What People Get Wrong about the Right to Vote w/ Asst. Prof. E. Zhang, UC Berkeley Law

What People Get Wrong about the Right to Vote

Speaker: Emily Zhang, Assistant Professor of Law, Berkeley Law

November 4 @ 12:45 - 2 p.m. Lunch provided in the Selznick Library:12:15 p.m.-12:45 p.m

Sponsors: Center for Right-Wing Studies, Center for the Study of Law and Society,
Center for Social Justice - UC Berkeley

Voters make mistakes. They don’t bring the right ID to the polling place. They register to vote after the registration deadline. They don’t re- register to vote after they move. They fail to “clothe” their mail-in ballots. They think they’re eligible to vote when they’re not. And they think they’re not eligible to vote when they are.

We should take these mistakes seriously.

Understanding what mistakes they make and why will help us better design election regimes and policies that maximize voter participation. Fixing the mistakes that cause ballots to be thrown out—and that we therefore capture in administrative data—would require making election laws less complicated and more intuitive. Addressing the mistakes that prevent people from trying to vote in the first place—and that therefore go unrecorded—would require much more than legal change.