The Scholarly Recount: A Useful Addition to the Methods of Voting Research … With An Example

“Elections are the ultimate mode of reducing each of us to a bean and counting us” (Verba 1993, 684). Things are not really that bad. On election day the voter, marking the typical American long ballot, makes a pronouncement more complex and nuanced than a single tally. We can learn much about voting behavior by paying attention to the full message that each voter sends us. This can be done by conducting a “scholarly recount”: sorting the ballots into groups representing the possible combinations of choices (Democratic for Congress, Republican for governor, Democratic for state senator, etc.) and counting them. The relative sizes of the groups can not only give us a precise answer to the often-asked question about the magnitude of ticket splitting, but also answer the more general and more important question: How do the voters distribute themselves among all possible combinations of candidate choices—two straight tickets and a great many mixed ones? The analyst may also find, in the composition of the candidate combinations attracting the largest numbers of voters, some clues as to the candidate characteristics and voter attitudes that are exerting the greatest influence on the ballot markings.