The Nonvoting Voter in Voting Research

Abstract

Postelection surveys consistently overestimate voter turnout by a substantial margin. This paper compares, via discriminant analysis of data from the 1978 National Election Study, the characteristics of respondents who falsely claim to have voted with the characteristics of actual voters and admitted nonvoters. More importantly, it undertakes two parallel analyses of the factors affecting voting or nonvoting. The first employs respondent-supplied voting data, and the second employs officially validated voting data. Even though misreporters differ in some respects from actual voters and admitted nonvoters, the parallel analyses in the latter part of the paper indicate that substantive conclusions about the factors that influence voting or nonvoting are largely unaffected by the use of validated as opposed to reported voting data.

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