(iPoster) "I Voted!”: Exploring the Roots of Over-Reported Voter Turnout

• In Event: Poster Session: Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (RBSI) Scholars

Abstract

When taking a survey, Americans often claim to have voted despite not actually doing so. Researchers have typically attributed this phenomenon to social desirability bias, often linked to higher education and greater awareness of the importance of voting, but some also suggest it may result from misremembering or simply be an artifact of the questionnaire. However, most studies ignore other demographic variables and rarely examine how their interactions affect misreporting. I argue that more educated Black and Latino people undergo a dual socialization process as a result of their intersectional identities, leading to compounded social pressures, thus making them more likely to misreport their voting behavior compared to white and Asian respondents. To test this, I leverage the validated voter data in the Cooperative Election Study (CES), using the cumulative file covering presidential elections from 2008 to 2020, to examine sensitivity to norms in different racial groups across various education levels. I find that education does not have a unique, statistically significant effect on misreporting among Black and Latino populations, although I argue that this is a result of data limitations and not a flaw in the theory. The findings indicate that drawing results about different identities' impact on misreporting from self-administered surveys may obscure the social pressures in misreporting, especially when such pressures are not directly present or activated.

Author

• Angel Sosa Llanos, Emory University