Post-election panel discusses voter registration, gerrymandering, recounts

A post-election panel, sponsored by JumboVote and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, was held in Sophia Gordon Multipurpose Room Tuesday night.The event focused on student questions in an effort to process and understand the results of the recent midterm election.

The panel consisted of Associate Professor of Political Science Richard Eichenberg, Professor of Political Science Deborah Schildkraut,Science, Technology, and Society Program Manager Aidan Kestigian and Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Sociology Paul Joseph.

JumboVote member Caroline Enloe, a junior, opened the event by asking the panelists what their expectations were going into the midterms. Schildkraut spoke first, saying that she had confidence in the polls leading up to Nov. 6.

“One thing that often gets lost a lot is that national polls in the 2016 election were actually pretty good,” she said. “It just so happened that the polls in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan were the bad ones.”

Joseph then said that President Donald Trump’s pre-election rhetoric jeopardized democracy.

“The politics of fear, the politics [of] white nationalism, the politics of attacking the media, attacking science, attacking information — I add all these things up and there's this real threat to our democracy,” Joseph said.

Following Joseph’s comments, Kestigian noted that state legislatures are usually responsible for congressional redistricting. This made last Tuesday’s results, in which several state legislatures saw shifts in power from one party to another, all the more critical, Kestigian added.

Eichenberg said that despite the Democrats’ retaking the House of Representatives after eight years of a Republican majority, there remain obstacles to their policy goals.

 “[In the Senate], there is a long-term structural advantage on the side of the Republicans,” he said.

Schildkraut noted one of the House Democrats’ top policy goals: to improve nationwide voter registration.

“The [Democrats] in the House are saying they want to have national automatic voter registration,” she said. “We know that this increases voter turnout because some states have experimented with it.”

Schildkraut also discussed the outsized impact that third-party candidates can have on electoral outcomes, affecting both Democrat and Republican candidates. She added that these results can lead to bipartisan support for the implementation of a ranked-choice voting system, in which voters rank candidates by preference, such as the one introduced in Maine.

The discussion then turned to gerrymandering, including its prevalence in the U.S. electoral landscape and recent efforts to combat it. Kestigian, who is also program manager for the Tufts/MIT Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, said she was pleased to see some states address gerrymandering directly in the midterms.

“I was heartened to see more of these independent commissions [on redistricting] gaining traction in some of the states,” Kestigian said.

When asked bySchildkraut if there is empirical evidence supporting such independent commissions, Kestigian said that the sample size of states was still too small to produce any measurable data. She also spoke to the difficulty of extrapolating data from different states, given their widely divergent electoral rules.

The panelists then discussed the electoral recounts currently underway in Florida and their implications for the future of American politics. Schildkraut began by expressing fear that portions of the electorate may reject the eventual outcomes of the recounts.

“[Recounts are] one area where I would say I’m not so optimistic,” she said. “[It] has the biggest risk of people just not accepting [results]. One of my biggest fears was that there would be a contingent of Trump supporters who do not accept the election outcome because of all the talk of election rigging.”

She added that the United States has not yet faced a situation in which people do not accept election outcomes.

“It’s a miracle that in our country … when one side loses, if they are an incumbent, they move out of the White House or the governor's house,” she said. “But we haven't really been tested with the person who currently occupies power not accepting that they lost.”

Eichenberg, in response to Schildkraut, said that provisional ballots, which are cast by voters unable to prove their identity at the polls pending later verification, are not always counted by the media on election night, leading to misperceptions of the outcomes of contentious races.

“The need to cast a provisional ballot is concentrated among the young and people of color,” Eichenberg said. “So when we are talking about counting or recounting, there are issues there that [risk] alienating whoever happens to be ahead.”

Drawing on Eichenberg’s comment, Schildkraut said that the media’s election reporting can sometimes misrepresent how many ballots are actually left to count.

“Part of the problem is you get these reports [from the media] saying its ‘99 percent reporting’ or ‘100 percent reporting,’ so it makes it seem like the vote is counted, and so if these new votes come from somewhere, it must be fishy,” she said. “The media can do a better job of educating people on what it means on election night to say a certain percentage of the votes are in.”

JumboVote member Dani Musoff reflected on the elections.

“While everyone was looking forward to 2018 and what it was going to show, that there are still a lot of questions out there and [2020] is still a big, even bigger, question,” Musoff, a junior, said.