| Affiliations: | DeBakey Executive Research Leadership Program |
| Project Leader: | Dr. Kristy Pathakis kpathakis@tamu.edu Political Science |
| Faculty Mentor: | |
| Meeting Times: | TBA |
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Team Size:
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3 |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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This project is in the beginning stages, so there will be possibilities to stay on for multiple semesters
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Team Needs:
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I welcome applications from students from all backgrounds and with any level of skills. I will train you on how to execute assigned tasks. This project will involve gathering data on state voting laws, and the changes in those laws since 2000. There will also be research into the literature. Since this project involves collecting publicly available data, I expect to be analyzing data somewhere from 6 months to a year from now, depending on how easy or hard it is to gather the data. So if your main interest is in data analysis, this may not be the best fit for you in the short term. |
| Description | Access to and facilitation of voting are considered one of the benchmarks of a functioning democracy, but felon disenfranchisement laws have limited access to the polls for many Americans for over a hundred years. Moreover, prison gerrymandering policies in some states count the incarcerated as residents of counties where their prisons are located, diluting their votes, and those of their communities. In addition to laws that directly target or affect those in the clutches of the criminal justice system, lawmakers have enacted a host of other policies that limit access to voting. We argue that when choosing policies to restrict the ability of citizens to vote, states have a menu of restrictive policies from which to choose. Whereas felon disenfranchisement laws and prison gerrymandering may be relatively easier to enact and defend, others, like voter identification laws or the widespread elimination of polling and ballot drop-off locations particularly in areas with large populations of minority voters, vary in their visibility and defensibility. We suggest that states are strategic in their choice of voter restriction policies, targeting those least likely to effectively fight back. We amass a dataset on the menu of restrictive voting policies in the states from 2000 to 2020 and assess to what degree these different restrictions are substitutes or complements to each other and whether politically unpopular groups – like currently or formerly incarcerated Americans – are the most likely targets of these laws |