Liar, Liar, Ballot on Fire: Turnout Misreporting in a Racially Diverse US

• In Event: Immigrants, Ethnic Identity and Political Participation

Abstract

Who is actually turning out to vote in an increasingly racially diverse contemporary United States? Group-specific norms about voting among specific populations, like the highly educated (Rolfe 2012, Silver et al. 1986) and minoritized communities who have been systematically segregated (Anoll 2018, Jenkins et al. 2021), shape group-specific norms about political participation. As such, racial groups and immigrant groups may create and perpetuate group-specific norms of voting which influence rates of overreporting. Despite the significant numbers of people of color in the United States, analyses of validated voter turnout have been largely limited to examining the validated voter turnout of white Americans and, to a more limited extent, African Americans. Using the Cooperative Election Study from 2010-2022, I find that Asian Americans and Latinx Americans have distinct overreporting patterns from both white Americans and Black Americans. Furthermore, variables which usually explain turnout, like education and partisanship, do not apply equally to all of the racial groups I examine. These differences are not simply the artefacts of higher proportions of immigrants in Asian American and Latinx American populations as these differences in misreporting persist over the course of immigrant generations. I contribute to the existing literature by considering turnout overreporting comparatively across racial identities and immigrant generations to better understand the factors which lead to overreporting. The ability to better understand the American electorate depends on seeing beyond the black-white binary and more closely examining validated turnout for Americans with a wide variety of experiences with being American.

Author

• Stephanie Chan, Lafayette College