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21 Election L.J. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/enlwjr21 and id is 1 raw text is: Original Articles ELECTION LAW JOURNAL Volume 21, Number 1, 2022 © Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/elj.2020.0708 Auditing the 2020 General Election in Georgia: Residual Vote Rates and a Confusing Ballot Format David Cottrell, Felix E. Herron, Michael C. Herron, and Daniel A. Smith ABSTRACT The 2020 general election in the United States took place against the backdrop of a pandemic and countless claims about voter fraud. The presidential race in Georgia was extremely close, and in this state both a hand and machine recount followed the initial promulgation of results. Armed with certified results, we conduct a statistical audit of the 2020 Georgia election by analyzing residual vote rates in statewide races. A race's residual vote rate combines the rates at which ballots contain undervotes (abstentions) and overvotes (when voters cast more than the allowed number of votes in a race). Anomalously high residual vote rates can be indicative of underlying election administration problems, and our analysis of these rates in Georgia finds nothing anomalous in the state's presidential race, a notable result given this contest's closeness. We do, however, uncover an unusually high overvote rate in Georgia's special United States Senate elec- tion. This overvote rate is concentrated in Gwinnett County and appears to reflect the county's two-column ballot design that led roughly 4,200 voters to select more than one candidate for Senate in the special elec- tion, in the process rendering invalid their votes in this contest. Gwinnett County's two-column ballot was not pivotal to the outcome of Georgia's Senate special election but nonetheless joins other ballot formats, like the infamous butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County in the 2000 presidential race, that contribute to voter confusion and should be avoided in the future. Keywords: residual vote rates, 2020 general election, ballot formats, election audit INTRODUCTION T HE 2020 GENERAL ELECTION was unique in American history. Conducted during the country's worst public health crisis since the Span- David Cottrell is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, USA. Felix E. Herron holds a BSc in Information Technology from the Tech- nical University of Berlin in Berlin, Germany. Michael C. Her- ron is a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. Daniel A. Smith is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, USA. An earlier draft of this article was presented at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association. The au- thors thank Nicolds Macri for research assistance and Charles Crabtree, Melissa Herman, Jack Santucci, Sara Loving, and four anonymous referees for feedback. ish Flu of 1918, millions of voters who would ordi- narily have voted in person instead cast ballots by mail (Sprunt 2020). Moreover, throughout its con- cluding months the election was awash in claims about voter fraud and other forms of malfeasance.1 These claims continued in the aftermath of the election, with legal challenges raised in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, among other states. Georgia's 2020 presidential contest was extre- mely close, and both a hand and a machine recount of this contest followed the initial promulgation of 'Andrew C. Eggers, Haritz Garro, and Justin Grimmer, No Evidence for Voter Fraud: A Guide to Statistical Claims About the 2020 Election. Unpublished working paper (2021) <https://www.dropbox.com/s/ol20sormtbw9w10/fraudexten ded_public.pdf?d1=0>. 1

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