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The article focuses on the relationships of information and personal characteristics to vote choice. This paper discusses one aspect of an electoral campaign, a campaign debate, by which information about candidates and their stands on political issues are communicated to the voter. A political campaign permits candidates to communicate to voters. In the process of communicating, the candidates attempt to project favorable images, discuss the issues most helpful to themselves, and manipulate symbols to elicit voter support. The media links candidates to publics by serving as a conduit for informational exchanges. As a conduit the press relies primarily on information provided by the candidates, seeing itself as mirroring events, with the result that the public is provided a bland, uniform, filling, but not satisfying diet of campaign information. In dealing with the supply of information, the usual psychological and sociological variables may be included as modifiers of informational exchanges.

This article focuses on a legislation on marking ballots. The ballot law of every state contains a section on how to mark the paper ballot. This section, brief in some states and detailed in others, covers the following points: the method of marking, materials to be used, the use of the write-in privilege and of pasters, and instructions to be printed on the ballot. For this study, which is limited to general elections, the laws and the ballots of all the forty-eight states have been examined. When there is irregularity of marking the practice is to allow the intention of the voter, if discernible, to prevail. Five states allow a combination of the cross mark and scratching or lining out. The Georgia law prescribes the use of the cross in the party- column parentheses for straight ticket voting, but requires that the voter line out the names of undesired candidates when a split ticket is voted. The Texas voter may vote a straight ticket by running a line vertically through all party columns voted against; he may vote a mixed ticket by running a line horizontally through the names of such candidates as he desires to vote against in the column of his preferred party and writing in the name of the candidate for whom he wishes to vote or leaving unscratched the desired names in other columns.

The article presents a pioneer study of contemporary significance in electoral behavior in reference to a paper on this issue written by Roscoe C. Martin. As far as taste is concerned there was a bias at the outset for selecting an article representing a contribution to an empirically based political science. Martin's piece certainly meets that standard. The article is an early attempt to investigate in a systematic, quantitative fashion a problem that has received considerable attention in more recent volumes of the Quarterly and other scholarly journals, the question of voting behavior in state and local elections. Martin's report of the socioeconomic and institutional factors associated with an Austin municipal election in 1933 precedes the major voting studies conducted on the national, state, and local levels by several years, even decades. But it is not enough merely to say that this study broke new ground in an era when political scientists generally took only marginal interest in studying electoral data; it is also worth remarking that Martin did so in a manner that is still significant for contemporary students of voting.