Hostname: page-component-7f64f4797f-rcs6z Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-11-04T12:00:06.066Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Punch Card Technology and the Racial Gap in Residual Votes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Justin Buchler ,
Matthew Jarvis  and
John E. McNulty
Justin Buchler
Affiliation:
Justin Buchler is visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College (jmbuchler@yahoo.com)
Matthew Jarvis
Affiliation:
Matthew Jarvis is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley (mjarvis@socrates.berkeley.edu)
John E. McNulty
Affiliation:
John McNulty is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley (mcnulty@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Votomatic-style punch card voting systems produce higher rates of residual voting than other technologies, but the effect of punch card voting systems is not uniform. Minority voters are less likely to have their votes properly recorded with punch card systems than are nonminorities. This racial gap occurs, for the most part, because punch card systems lead to higher rates of “undervoting” by minorities. When election administrators switch to other systems, such as optical scan systems, the racial gap is significantly reduced. Punch card voting systems, then, constitute a disproportionate obstacle to minority voting. This effectively gives less weight to votes cast by minorities than to votes cast by nonminorities, and arguably violates constitutional requirements for equal voting rights. The mechanism is similar to the literacy tests that were abandoned after the 1970 amendments to the Voting Rights Act.The authors are grateful to UC Berkeley's Survey Research Center for research support and are deeply indebted to Henry E. Brady. Our thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and to the editorial staff at Perspectives on Politics for their helpful suggestions and hard work on our behalf.

Information

Type
SYMPOSIUM
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 517 - 524
Copyright
© 2004 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Baker v. Carr. 369 U.S. 186 (1962).
Brady, Henry E. 2000. What happened in Palm Beach County? http://socrates.berkeley.edu/∼ucdtpums/palm2.pdf.
Brady, Henry E., Justin Buchler, Matt Jarvis, and John McNulty. 2001. Counting all the votes: The performance of voting technology in the United States. Berkeley: University of California. http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/countingallthevotes.pdf.
Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project. 2001. Voting: What is, what could be. Pasadena and Cambridge: California Institute of Technology and MIT. http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Reports/july01/July01_VTP_%20Voting_Report_Entire.pdf.
City of Mobile v. Bolden. 446 U.S. 55 (1980).
Common Cause, et al. v. Jones. No. 01-03470, C.D. Cal. 2002.
Davis v. Schnell. 81 F. Supp. 872 (MD Ala. 1949).
General Accounting Office. 2001. Statistical analysis of factors that affected uncounted votes in the 2000 presidential election. Washington, DC. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02122.pdf.
Gray v. Sanders. 372 U.S. 368 (1963).
Hansen, Bruce E. 2000. A precinct-level demographic analysis of double-punching in the Palm Beach presidential vote. Working Paper. November 20. University of Wisconsin. http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/∼bhansen/vote/florida2.pdf.
Herron, Michael C., and Jasjeet S. Sekhon. 2003. Overvoting and representation: An examination of overvoted presidential ballots in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties. Electoral Studies 22 (1): 21–47.Google Scholar
House Committee on Government Reform. 2001. Income and racial disparities in the undercount in the 2000 presidential election. Washington, DC. http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs/pdf_inves/pdf_elec_nat_study.pdf.
Karcher v. Daggett. 462 US 725 (1983).
Knack, Stephen, and Martha Kropf. 2001. Invalidated ballots in the 1996 presidential election: A cross-level analysis. Working Paper. University of Maryland and University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Lassiter v. Northampton Election Board. 360 U.S. 45 (1959).
Oregon v. Mitchell. 400 U.S. 112 (1970).
Reynolds v. Sims. 377 U.S. 533 (1964).
Shaw v. Reno. 509 U.S. 630 (1993).
Southwest Voter Registration Education Project v. Shelley. D.C. No. CV-03-05715-SVW (2003)
Tomz, Michael, and Robert P. van Houweling. 2003. How does voting equipment affect the racial gap in voided ballots? American Journal of Political Science 47 (1): 46–60.Google Scholar
Wesberry v. Sanders. 376 U.S. 1 (1964).
White v. Regester. 412 U.S. 755 (1973).