Electing to vote — or not
This election season, both presidential candidates are vying for the Latino vote. Just how many votes that represents will depend on how many Latinos register and how many go to the polls. And those numbers will depend, in part, on the information they receive. In a paper published last year in the American Political Science Review, Ariel White and co-authors showed that election administrators responsible for providing information to potential voters are less likely to respond to email inquiries from Latino-sounding names than they are to non-Latino, white-sounding ones — and when they do respond, their answers are of lower quality. The paper, titled "What Do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials," recently received the Heinz Eulau Award for best article of the year published in the APSR, the political science discipline’s flagship journal. Reviewers noted the paper’s “far reaching implications for the study of democracy and...