The Early Voting Information Center
We are a non-partisan academic research center based at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Professor Paul Gronke and his team conduct research on early voting and election reform, predominantly in the United States. In addition to our scholarly research, we have worked on projects with the Pew Center on the States, the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the Center for American Progress and a number of state and local elections offices.
The Early Voting Information Center is proud to have co-hosted the inaugural Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference in July of 2017. More information can be found on the conference website.
Professor Gronke’s academic credentials–including his curriculum vita, courses taught, and other research papers–can be found at his personal Reed web page.
- Research Analyst: Brian Hamel, PhD student, UCLA Dept. of Political Science.
- Assistant: Laura Swann, Reed College (’19).
- Research Coordinator: Mia Leung, Reed College (’19).
A new article by the ever-active Seth Masket and Michael Miller examines the impact of publicly financed elections in Arizona and Maine on candidate extremism. There are arguments on both sides of this issue; the authors seem sympathetic to the viewpoint that removing private money from the system may in fact help ideologically extreme candidates by removing “market forces.” I suspect that conventional wisdom is just the opposite.
Polarization, they conclude, is driven by “massive historical forces,” and is unlikely to be impacted by public financing. Long and short: there may be many reasons to adopt public financing, but legislative moderation (or extremism) is not one of them.