Invalid Ballots Under the Hare System of Proportional Representation

A Taxonomy of Protest Voting

“…Those who study election administration know that there are always anomalies in the tabulation of ballots. Since the earliest days of the study of political science, rates of unmarked and mismarked ballots have been taken to be measures of the reliability, usability, and accuracy of electoral systems and balloting technologies (Mott 1926). The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project has documented that the residual vote, i.e., the fraction of uncounted ballots among those cast, is correlated with the particular type of voting technology in use (Sinclair & Alvarez 2004).…”

What Affects Invalid Voting? A Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Two studies use natural or quasi-experimental designs (Hirczy 1994; Singh 2017). There are nine other studies on invalid voting that do not use inferential statistics to test causal models (Cohen 2016: 83; Giugăl and Ogaru 2013; Hill and Young 2007; Mackerras and McAllister 1999; Mott 1926; Śleszyński 2015; Stiefbold 1965; Young and Hill 2009; Zulfikarpasic 2001) and two qualitative case studies (Obradović-Wochnik and Wochnik 2014; Pehr 2009).…”

“…This model supposes that some voters are incompetent to cast a valid vote but intend to do so. The first studies on invalid voting showed that a low level of education of the electorate is to blame for an excessive number of such invalid votes (Mott 1926). Invalid voting results from an unintentional error of the voter due to the complex electoral system or ballot design (Carman et al 2008; Herron and Sekhon 2005; Kimball and Kropf 2005; Pachón et al 2017; Power and Roberts 1995; Taylor 2012), which interact with the voter’s lack of skill and competence to cast a ballot correctly (Hill and Young 2007; Hooghe et al 2011; McAllister and Makkai 1993; Power and Garand 2007; Reynolds and Steenbergen 2006).…”

Ignorance or Opposition? Blank and Spoiled Votes in Low-Information, Highly Politicized Environments

“…A small academic literature assesses this phenomenon in comparative perspective, systematically considering blank and spoiled voting in countries around the world. While a number of studies consider the rates of ballot invalidation in particular states or countries (Mott 1926;Steifbold 1965), increasingly scholars leverage subnational variation across electoral districts (Aldashev and Mastrobuoni 2013;Herron and Sekhon 2005;Knack and Kropf 2003;McAllister and Makkai 1993;Power and Roberts 1995;Sinclair and Alvarez 2004) or cross-sectional variance across countries and over time (Power and Garand 2007;Uggla 2008). This research typically differentiates between voter capacity and political motivations as reasons for invalid voting (Aldashev and Mastrobuoni 2013;Herron and Sekhon 2005;Knack and Kropf 2003;Mott 1926;Sinclair and Alvarez 2004;Steifbold 1965).…”

“…In the American context, "under voting" or ballot roll-off is especially common in down-ballot or low salience races where voters may lack knowledge of candidates or are unfamiliar with the office itself (Hall 2007;Knack and Kropf 2003;Sinclair and Alvarez 2004;Streb, Frederick, and LaFrance 2009;Wattenberg, McAllister, and Salvanto 2000). Comparative scholarship emphasizes the institutional dimension of this problem, identifying institutional designs that increase the informational demands of voters (Mott 1926;Steifbold 1965). McAllister and Makkai (1993) compare vote invalidations in Australian House and Senate races, noting that blank and spoiled ballots are more common in the Senate contests owing to the relatively complicated single-transferable vote (STV) procedure.…”