Pollsters talk to voters all the time, but it’s usually with one thing in mind — to find out how they voted. Pollsters rarely probe a topic that is near and dear to the hearts of election geeks — what the voters experienced on Election Day. What do voters experience when they go to vote? To help answer this question, I have led a public opinion project, the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), for the past six years. I gave a glimpse into the results from the 2012 edition at Pew’s recent conference, Voting in America, on December 10.
The SPAE is the nation’s only large-scale public opinion project that comprehensively studies the experience of voters in presidential elections. In 2012, we interviewed 10,200 registered voters, 200 from each state and the District of Columbia, in the days right after the November election.
A survey as comprehensive as the SPAE will take weeks to digest; but as an initial peek at the data, I offered some observations at the Voting in America conference along four topics: (1) the overall voter experience, (2) voter identification, (3) waiting in line to vote, and (4) partisan divisions over election reform issues.
Full Article: electionlineWeekly.