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By Laura Hinkle
In my time interning this semester, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with various projects through the Overseas Voting Initiative (OVI) team. Our overarching goal is to support policy initiatives that make voting for uniformed and overseas citizens as accessible as possible. One of the ongoing projects I’ve been working on is an initiative related to faxing. Almost half of the states in America have laws declaring that the only methods of return that can be used for overseas ballots is mail and electronic transmission, with electronic transmission specifically being defined as “fax” or “facsimile”. One of my first tasks when I joined OVI was to pull election laws for overseas voters from every state’s election code and document each state’s options for method of return. If a state had fax or facsimile language, I traced the history of the legislation and its amendments to find when this language was put into law. On top of this, I’ve helped in the compilation of polling data from the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP). This polling determines what methods of return most overseas citizens have been using in the past decade.
The long-term goal of all this data compilation is to analyze when states started codifying archaic language like faxing into their laws, back it up with polling to show that it is an ineffective method of return, and make a policy suggestion to states with fax language to remove it from their election code. Sifting through thousands of pages of election code has not been an easy task but using the critical analysis skills I’ve picked up in classes like Political Research has been essential to my success. The knowledge I gained in this class in relation to coding, cross-tabulating data to find trends, and using these trends to generate graphs has given me the tools to go above and beyond in my internship.
My team has also been working on a sophisticated election tracker, where we track candidates running for an executive position in every state, focusing on demographic information such as gender and race. The intersectional analysis of this data will be incredibly interesting, especially because my team leader has given me the opportunity to analyze it creatively. Once we are finished with our data collection, I plan to focus on governor’s races, and how incumbent retention correlates to the severity of Covid-19 executive orders. In addition, I’m focusing on states that have been hot spots for Black Lives Matter protests recently, to examine whether incumbents are getting voted out of office in higher rates in these areas, despite the fact that many of them are Democrats. The opportunity to approach election policy in such a hands-on way has been one of the most valuable parts of my internship.
Laura Hinkle is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2022. She is studying political science, philosophy, and history at the University of Louisville.