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"Assessing the Impact of the United States Postal System and Election Administration on Absentee and Mail Voting in U.S. Elections." President Donald Trump's harmful rhetoric about both election security and election officials themselves cast doubt in the minds of voters. Election administration - and arguably democracy in the United States - faced a turning point with the 2020 elections. [Extracted from the article]

The use of incentives coupled with introductory themes emphasizing cooperation and helpfulness is studied to understand their effect on survey response. The findings suggest that norms of cooperation and community interests matter more than self-interest in the decision to participate in a survey and further research may strengthen this view.

To what extent have the reforms of the last decade led to measurable improvements in election administration? Enacted in 2002, the Help America Vole Act (HAVA) addressed a variety of election reform issues, but emphasized modernizing voting equipment across the country (Kropf and Kimball. 2012). It did not require changes in ballot design, although states and localities have implemented some new practices in this area. This article examines changes in voting technology and ballot design in North Carolina, focusing on residual votes in the state's 2004 and 2008 general elections. North Carolina is an especially useful state to study, because county-level early and absentee voting data are available by race. It is also a presidential battleground state covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This study finds that residual votes went down in North Carolina from 2004-2008 due to new voting equipment. It also finds evidence that ballot design marginally improved over that time period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of U.S. states have constitutional language, statutes, or court decisions that if applied as worded, could bar individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) from voting. Here, we investigate the difference between the voting competence and political knowledge of individuals with TB! and that of "average" college students using measures of voting capacity and election-specific political knowledge. We recruited 14 individuals with TBI who are participating in a larger study on the relationship between disability and political participation at Carolinas Medical Center. We compared their responses to healthy controls (HC) (students at a large public university in North Carolina; n = 22) on voting competency and political knowledge using the Competency Assessment Tool for Voting (designed by Appelbaum, Bonnie, and Karlawish), as well as measures of 2008 election information and questions drawn from the United States Citizen and Immigration Services citizenship exam. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to compare election-specific knowledge of persons with TBI and HCs. We find that those with TB! scored similarly to the healthy controls on competence to vote and election-specific knowledge. We conclude suffrage laws should not be based on overly broad, general assumptions regarding the cognitive capacity of citizens, but on whether or not they express a desire to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State and local election officials play an important role in implementing election laws and administrative rules. There is some suspicion that election officials may tilt rules and procedures to help a favored party, prompting recent proposals for nonpartisan election administration in the United States. We examine the impact of state and local election officials on provisional voting in the 2004 presidential election, the first national election in which provisional voting was required by federal law. We find suggestive evidence of partisanship in the selection of state rules governing the counting of provisional ballots. We also find conditional partisan effects in the casting and counting of provisional ballots. In 2004, provisional ballots were more likely to be cast and counted in heavily partisan jurisdictions administered by an election authority of the same party. Additionally, other state-level administrative features (prior experience with provisional voting, a statewide registration database, and rules for counting provisional votes cast in the wrong precinct) strongly affected provisional voting in 2004. Election administration in the United States should be subjected to more scruti

A series of mutations of the P1 plasmid prophage that lead to increased copy number was isolated and analyzed. The copy number of the mutants was elevated at least five- to eightfold relative to wild-type P1, as determined by single-cell resistance to antibiotics, activity of enzymes, content of superhelical DNA, and reassociation kinetics. The copy number of two of the mutants was temperature dependent. Based on dominance tests, the mutants fell into two classes, cisspecific and recessive. The latter class included a temperature-sensitive copy mutant. The existence of a class of recessive mutants suggests that the replication of the P1 plasmid is negatively regulated.