The Politics of Locating Polling Places: Race and Partisanship in North Carolina Election Administration, 2008-2016
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2021-06-01
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Do local election administrators change precincts and Election Day polling place locations to target voters based on their partisanship or race? We systematically evaluate whether decisions consistent with targeting occur using the near universe of eligible voters, polling place locations, and precinct boundaries across three presidential elections in the closely contested state of North Carolina. We find no evidence that local administrators allocate precincts and polling places in a manner consistent with partisan manipulation for electoral gain. Some counties appear to differentially target opposition party voters with these changes, but the county-level variation we document is likely due to random variation rather than deliberate manipulation. There is also little evidence that the removal of minority voter protections in Shelby County v. Holder impacted polling place placement. If partisan-motivated precinct or polling place decisions occur in North Carolina, they are seemingly more idiosyncratic than pervasive.
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Shepherd, ME, A Fresh, N Eubank and JD Clinton (2021). The Politics of Locating Polling Places: Race and Partisanship in North Carolina Election Administration, 2008-2016. Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy, 20(2). pp. 155–177. 10.1089/elj.2019.0602 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/24334.
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Adriane Stewart Fresh
I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. I received my PhD in Political Science at Stanford in 2017, and my MA in Economics at Stanford in 2015. Prior to arriving at Duke, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University.
I study the political economy of development. My research concerns how elites respond to dramatic economic and institutional changes. I'm interested in the effects of these changes on elite persistence and the strategies that elites employ to contend with potential disruptions to their power. I study a diverse set of historical time periods and country contexts including the Industrial Revolution in Britain, regime change in Chile, and black enfranchisement in the US. I am interested in quantitative methods, and I have a particular interest in causal inference in the context of observational research, as well as natural language processing using large corpuses of historical and historiographical text.
Nicholas Eubank
I am an Associate Research Professor in the Duke Department of Political Science and Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), where I study a range of topics related to political accountability, including gerrymandering, social networks, election administration, and race and incarceration. My peer-reviewed work can be found in a range of journals, including APSR, Political Analysis, QJPS, PSRM, Election Law Journal, and Journal of Legal Analysis.
I am also the Director of the Duke Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science (MIDS) program, the current MIDS Director of Graduate Studies, and an Associate Director of the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke.
I am passionate about empowering students of all backgrounds to use data science tools to solve real-world problems. To that end, I teach two courses in the first-year MIDS curriculum. Practical Data Science (IDS 720), a flipped-classroom, exercise-focused course designed to give students practical experience wrangling and analyzing messy, real-world data using the tools of a professional data scientist. Causal Inference & Solving Real Problems with Data (IDS 701), a course that teaches methods for answering causal questions and transitioning from doing well-scaffolded classroom exercises to solving messy, real-world problems. I also teach a Computational Methods for Social Scientists bootcamp each year for incoming social science graduate students from Political Science and Sociology.
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