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A Method to Audit the Assignment of Registered Voters to Districts and Precincts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2020

Brian Amos Open the ORCID record for Brian Amos [Opens in a new window]  and
Michael P. McDonald
Brian Amos*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS67260, USA. Email: [email protected]
Michael P. McDonald
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL32611, USA. Email: [email protected]
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Electoral boundaries are an integral part of election administration. District boundaries delineate which legislative election voters are eligible to participate in, and precinct boundaries identify, in many localities, where voters cast in-person ballots on Election Day. Election officials are tasked with resolving a tremendously large number of intersections of registered voters with overlapping electoral boundaries. Any large-scale data project is susceptible to errors, and this task is no exception. In two recent close elections, these errors were consequential to the outcome. To address this problem, we describe a method to audit the assignment of registered voters to districts. We apply the methodology to Florida’s voter registration file to identify thousands of registered voters assigned to the wrong state House district, many of which local election officials have verified and rectified. We discuss how election officials can best use this technique to detect registered voters assigned to the wrong electoral boundary.

Keywords

geocodinggeographic information systemsdata analysis algorithms
Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 356 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology.

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Footnotes

Authors’ note: The replication materials for this paper can be found at Amos (2019).

Contributing Editor: Jeff Gill

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