Voting and elections

Prof. Evan Lieberman speaks with Voice of America: Straight Africa Talk host Haydé Adams about the “ghost of apartheid,” and the electoral future of South Africa.

Writing for The Washington Post, Prof. Charles Stewart III provides evidence that hand counting paper ballots is less accurate than using ballot scanners to tabulate results. “Computers — which ballot scanners rely on — are very good at tedious, repetitive tasks,” writes Stewart. “Humans are bad at them. And counting votes is tedious and repetitive.”

A new report by researchers from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab “examines the federal government’s history of election spending—and suggests ways it could consider dispersing monies to help underfunded election administrators,” reports Talib Visram for Fast Company. “The federal government not being a full partner in the game, especially given its fiscal resources, contributes mightily to the underfunding of this area,” says Prof. Charles Stewart III.

Writing for The New York Times, Steven Simon of the MIT Center for International Studies and Jonathan Stevenson of the International Institute for Strategic Studies underscore the need for extensive analysis of the growing dangers to American democracy. “The overarching idea is, publicly and thoroughly, to probe just how bad things could get precisely to ensure that they never do,” they write, “and that America’s abject political decay is averted.”

GBH’s Basic Black host Callie Crossley speaks with Lecturer Malia Lazu,about how issues surrounding Covid-19, voting rights, economic downturn, police brutality, education, climate change and politics will impact communities of color in the coming year. “What I see is a democracy fighting itself,” says Lazu. "People in power, republicans or democrats, being bought into the idea of democracy more than the people in the democracy.”

Legatum Center Lecturer Malia Lazu speaks with GBH News about the impact Latino voters could have on Boston’s mayoral race. “With voter turnout being as low as we see [in] mayor’s races in Boston, the Latino community can really become a deciding factor in this race,” says Lazu. “Latinos have a history of coming together and electing people that will serve their community. And I think this race will be another example of that.”

“Real Talk for Change,” a new civic engagement campaign launched by MIT researchers, aims to give voice to regular people across the City of Boston, especially those who feel ignored, reports Meghan E. Irons for The Boston Globe. “We see this as the first step to building what I like to call a new civic infrastructure,’’ says Professor of the practice of community development Ceasar McDowell. “We need new ways to do democracy in this country that are really about honoring the experiences that people have on the ground.”

Writing for The Guardian, Sam Levine spotlights Prof. Charles Stewart’s work investigating election administration during the 2020 presidential election. Levine writes that Stewart plans to “dig deeper into ballot rejection rates. Among rejected ballots, about a third went uncounted because of signature matching problems. Around 12% were rejected because the voter missed the deadline to return the ballot.”

Boston Globe reporter Kevin Lewis highlights a new study by MIT researchers that finds “voter turnout increased by several percentage points among municipal employees in New York City whose hourly wages were affected by increases in the minimum wage.”

A new study by Prof. Charles Stewart III and graduate student Jesse T. Clark explores voter confidence in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, reports Stephen L. Carter for Bloomberg Opinion. Stewart and Clark found that Democrats had extreme confidence in the election results, which may have been “influenced by a strong negative repudiation of Trump’s calling the results of the election into question.”

A new study by researchers from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab finds that there is bipartisan support for some voting changes included in a bill that passed the House, reports Ryan Teague Beckwith for Bloomberg News. The researchers found that “87% of Republicans supported requiring paper backups for electronic voting machines, and 62% backed making Election Day a holiday, both provisions of the Democratic legislation.”

A new survey by researchers from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab found that long waiting times were more common for early voters during the 2020 presidential election than than they were on Election Day, reports Kevin Quealy and  Alicia Parlapiano for The New York Times. The researchers found “14 percent of Election Day voters waited more than 30 minutes to vote, an increase from 2016.”

A national survey led by Prof. Charles Stewart III found that Americans generally had smooth experiences voting in the 2020 presidential election, reports Alexa Corse for The Wall Street Journal. Stewart explains that he thinks many voters will continue voting by mail in the future. “I think there will be less reeling back than the rhetoric is suggesting right now,” says Stewart. “State legislatures are going to discover that a lot of the security questions they have are based on exaggerated claims.”

Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks with NBC 10 about mail-in voting during the 2020 presidential election and the impact of USPS delays. “It was really heartening to see not only the experiment going well, but everything it took to make it happen,” said Stewart. “Voters have taken a bite of the apple and many of them are going to continue voting by mail.”

In an article for The Washington Post, Prof. Charles Stewart III examines how the rural-urban divide is reshaping American politics. “Between 2016 and 2020, votes shifted most in the middle of that rural-urban continuum,” writes Stewart. “These regions’ voters are likely to be most prone to shifting again in 2024.”