Voting Patterns

The three research studies, Kelley and Mirer’s The Simple Act of Voting (1974), Clausen’s Response Validity: Vote Report (1968), and Flannelly, Flannelly, and McLeod’s Comparison of Election Predictions, Voter Certainty and Candidate Choice on Political Polls (1998), all work to improve the explanation of how voters make their decisions when voting. The studies prove that voting predictions are forced to take many other factors into consideration, including time, personal connection, and the choice to actually vote. Humans do not always follow a straight path. The following studies helped increase the realization that the voter’s own initial voting prediction usually matches the voting decision they make at the election, but it is difficult to explain why a voter chooses to vote or not vote. Kelley and Mirer’s The Simple Act of Voting (1974) addressed the difficult question of predicting how someone will vote, while attempting to explain why voters chose to …show more content…
It outlines the multiple reasons for the overestimates of voter turnout. The official estimate of voter turnout includes those who are not allowed to vote and those who are unlikely to vote, including those in hospitals, nursing homes, and sanitariums. People living in hotels, flophouses, and YM-YWCA’s, and part of missions are not included in the estimates of the SCR since the turnout is unpredictable. It is difficult to predict voter turnout due to inaccuracy of surveys; surveys are only as honest as the participants and can only measure predictable outcomes. Humans are not always predictable, causing issues for researchers studying voter predictions (Clausen,