Project Summary

In 2006, the University of New Mexico (Professor Lonna Atkeson) and Colorado State University (Professor Kyle Saunders) collaborated to field a post-election mixed-mode (Internet and mail) survey in two of the most anticipated competitive congressional races in the county: New Mexico’s First Congressional District (NMCD1) and Colorado’s Seventh Congressional District (COCD7). We were interested in learning about how citizens interact with the election administration process and providing that information to policy makers and other interested actors. Both New Mexico and Colorado have recently undergone myriad reforms in their voting laws in response to interest group pressure to create fair, accurate and voter-verifiable election administration systems, making these states excellent choices for studying public opinion regarding election reform. New Mexico, for example, is the first state to move from a predominantly electronic voting system to one that mandated optical scan bubble paper ballots statewide, with the intent of providing a paper trail so that elections could be audited for accuracy. Furthermore, New Mexico passed legislation to implement a statewide 2% audit, beginning in 2008, to ensure the accuracy and fairness of election outcomes. Meanwhile, Colorado has been the frontrunner in the implementation of many innovative election changes, including vote centers, and recent changes to the law mandate a paper trail to ensure voter integrity. Both states have also been early adopters of early voting as well as no excuse absentee voting, resulting in many voters choosing to cast their ballots prior to Election Day. In addition, we were involved in observing and collecting data in these contests and so wished to augment that deeply qualitative knowledge of the district with a quantitative survey.

Survey questions asked respondents about their election experience (voter confidence, voting problems, method of voting, experience with poll workers, voter satisfaction), faith in the election process (including the ability of the machines to provide paper audits), attitudes toward fraud, voter access, and voter identification as well as other political attitudes and behaviors including evaluations of the president, the congressional candidates, and their local and state election administrators. We also asked several questions related to the congressional race (vote choice, political activity, etc.) and a variety of demographics.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following organizations for their assistance with this project. First, the Research Allocation Committee at the University of New Mexico provided us with some of the financial support to undertake this project. It was also supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Political Science Department at the University of New Mexico.

We would also like to thank the following individuals who assisted in the preparation and implementation of the project. These include: political science staff assistant Joann Buehler who did enormous amounts of support work, political science graduate student Luciana Zilberman who oversaw the implementation of the survey, graduate student Lisa Bryant who designed the mail survey option, political science undergraduate student Alex Adams who worked on all aspects of the project, but especially data management, bulk mail supervisor Alisha Foster, Former New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and former Colorado Secretary of State Gigi Dennis who provided us with the voter registration file, political science chair Professor Mark Peceny, Zoe Johnson who provided technical support on Opinio 5.0. We’d also like to thank those who reviewed our survey before we went into the field including: Robert Cary (Los Alamos National Labs), Professor Quin Monson (Brigham Young University), Professor Ron Rapoport (College of William and Mary), Professor Walter J. Stone (University of California Davis), Professor Cherie Maestas (Florida State University), Professor James McCann (Purdue University), Professor Thad Hall (University of Utah), Professor R. Michael Alvarez (Caltech University), Professor David Magleby (Brigham Young University), Professor Kelly Patterson (Brigham Young University), Elvis Davis, Matthew Bryant, Rick Atkeson, and all of the registered voters who responded to our request for participation.

If you have any questions or comments about this summary or about this project please contact Professor Lonna Atkeson at (505) 660-8976 or e-mail her at: atkeson@unm.edu.