Thessalia Merivaki, Mara Suttmann-Lea, and Martha Kropf. "Building an Informed Citizenry, Starting with Elections: How the Voter Experience Shapes Knowledge About Voting Requirements." (Under review)
In this paper, we explore which factors explain voters' knowledge of voting requirements in their state. Drawing from informational, resource, and experiential models of political knowledge, we argue that knowledge about who can vote and how is driven by structural and experiential factors that shape the voter experience: residing in a state with a robust voter communications infrastructure maintained by election officials and casting a vote. We leverage a novel set of election-knowledge questions from the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey, merged with a dataset of election officials' organic and paid social media and online communications during the 2022 U.S. midterms. Controlling for voters' socio-economic characteristics, political knowledge, and media consumption behavior, we find that in-person voters were more likely to know whether residents in their state could vote without a government-issued identification, or if they did not register ahead of Election Day. In states where state election officials were highly active in sharing election-related information during the election cycle, voters were more likely to know about identification requirements and Same Day / Election Day registration. Our findings have implications about citizen perceptions about the election process, and raise questions about whether incorrect views about voting requirements could deter voter participation.
Thessalia Merivaki, Mara Suttmann-Lea, Jorge Bris Moreno, Kersyn McBride, Santiago Vidal, Matt Steinberg. "Same message, different words? Exploring differences in trust-building communications among State Election Officials."
Voter confidence scholars have documented that communication and outreach efforts by election officials yield positive outcomes insofar as building trust in election integrity. Strategies that include consistent trust-building communications on social media, ongoing face-to-face efforts, and partnerships with trusted surrogates have worked well to move the needle even among the most resistant to respond to evidence that elections are secure, or invitations to observe the election process directly. While the field has made progress in documenting which initiatives state and local election officials engage in to build trust, less emphasis has been placed on how messages are constructed to reach specific audiences. In this paper, we are particularly interested in exploring differences in how trust-building messages are constructed and disseminated by state election officials depending on their partisanship, their tenure, as well as the partisan performance of the constituency they represent. Although we should not expect differences in overall messaging strategy, namely communicating that election officials are trusted sources and that elections are safe, we should expect differences in terminology that is more likely to resonate with co-partisan audiences. Drawing from a one-of-a kind dataset of social media communications of state election officials during the 2022 and 2024 election cycles on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X we present findings from manual and computational text analysis that aim to identify differences in communication styles between Democratic and Republican state election officials, as well as nonpartisan election board. Our findings have important implications about messenger effects, as state election officials are more likely to be scrutinized, and have been scrutinized, for partisan behavior while overseeing elections.
Fernanda Gonzalez, Alejandro Flores, Samuel Baltz, Thessalia Merivaki, Mara Suttmann-Lea. “Do local governments provide information about elections in the languages their constituents speak?”
Large segments of the American electorate engage in politics in languages other than English. It is a distinct political experience codified into law in Sections 4(f)(4) and 203 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1975 with the inclusion of constitutional protections challenging the very notion of an English-only electoral process. We investigate modern-day compliance with such directives with the goal of understanding whether, when, and how do public officials take steps to accommodate the linguistic needs of their constituents. Because Americans are increasingly participating in politics online, and the process of registering for elections typically begins on a local government office’s website or an election administrator’s social media account, we measure the availability of multilingual, election-related information on these platforms across three states: Texas, Massachusetts, and Florida. We find that the availability of translations does broadly track with the presence of linguistic groups who that translation serves, but that there are important exceptions, including localities that have Section 203 requirements to provide election materials in a certain language but do not by default translate their election websites into those languages. Through this research, we can begin to understand how voting is or is not made more accessible for all voters, particularly for those that must navigate a linguistic divide.
In this paper, we explore which factors explain voters' knowledge of voting requirements in their state. Drawing from informational, resource, and experiential models of political knowledge, we argue that knowledge about who can vote and how is driven by structural and experiential factors that shape the voter experience: residing in a state with a robust voter communications infrastructure maintained by election officials and casting a vote. We leverage a novel set of election-knowledge questions from the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey, merged with a dataset of election officials' organic and paid social media and online communications during the 2022 U.S. midterms. Controlling for voters' socio-economic characteristics, political knowledge, and media consumption behavior, we find that in-person voters were more likely to know whether residents in their state could vote without a government-issued identification, or if they did not register ahead of Election Day. In states where state election officials were highly active in sharing election-related information during the election cycle, voters were more likely to know about identification requirements and Same Day / Election Day registration. Our findings have implications about citizen perceptions about the election process, and raise questions about whether incorrect views about voting requirements could deter voter participation.
Thessalia Merivaki, Mara Suttmann-Lea, Jorge Bris Moreno, Kersyn McBride, Santiago Vidal, Matt Steinberg. "Same message, different words? Exploring differences in trust-building communications among State Election Officials."
Voter confidence scholars have documented that communication and outreach efforts by election officials yield positive outcomes insofar as building trust in election integrity. Strategies that include consistent trust-building communications on social media, ongoing face-to-face efforts, and partnerships with trusted surrogates have worked well to move the needle even among the most resistant to respond to evidence that elections are secure, or invitations to observe the election process directly. While the field has made progress in documenting which initiatives state and local election officials engage in to build trust, less emphasis has been placed on how messages are constructed to reach specific audiences. In this paper, we are particularly interested in exploring differences in how trust-building messages are constructed and disseminated by state election officials depending on their partisanship, their tenure, as well as the partisan performance of the constituency they represent. Although we should not expect differences in overall messaging strategy, namely communicating that election officials are trusted sources and that elections are safe, we should expect differences in terminology that is more likely to resonate with co-partisan audiences. Drawing from a one-of-a kind dataset of social media communications of state election officials during the 2022 and 2024 election cycles on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X we present findings from manual and computational text analysis that aim to identify differences in communication styles between Democratic and Republican state election officials, as well as nonpartisan election board. Our findings have important implications about messenger effects, as state election officials are more likely to be scrutinized, and have been scrutinized, for partisan behavior while overseeing elections.
Fernanda Gonzalez, Alejandro Flores, Samuel Baltz, Thessalia Merivaki, Mara Suttmann-Lea. “Do local governments provide information about elections in the languages their constituents speak?”
Large segments of the American electorate engage in politics in languages other than English. It is a distinct political experience codified into law in Sections 4(f)(4) and 203 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1975 with the inclusion of constitutional protections challenging the very notion of an English-only electoral process. We investigate modern-day compliance with such directives with the goal of understanding whether, when, and how do public officials take steps to accommodate the linguistic needs of their constituents. Because Americans are increasingly participating in politics online, and the process of registering for elections typically begins on a local government office’s website or an election administrator’s social media account, we measure the availability of multilingual, election-related information on these platforms across three states: Texas, Massachusetts, and Florida. We find that the availability of translations does broadly track with the presence of linguistic groups who that translation serves, but that there are important exceptions, including localities that have Section 203 requirements to provide election materials in a certain language but do not by default translate their election websites into those languages. Through this research, we can begin to understand how voting is or is not made more accessible for all voters, particularly for those that must navigate a linguistic divide.