University Honors

Among the many hotly contested election laws in the country, one of the mostcontentious is ballot harvesting. This practice, ballot harvesting, entails that any designatedperson that a voter selects, or any political campaign official, can collect and submit an absenteeballot on their behalf to the voting polls. As of now, California does make ballot harvesting legalunlike in some states of the US where this practice was widely condemned and banned. Thisprompts further inspection because although there has been no evidence of ballot harvesting usedfor voter fraud, the practice bears ethical concerns among state lawmakers. To do so, I conducteda survey experiment on UCR undergraduates in the winter of 2024. Subjects were randomlyassigned a vignette that described ballot harvesting, described ballot harvesting and includedadditional text about who uses ballot harvesting, or described ballot harvesting and includedadditional text on concerns about electoral integrity. Neither treatment message changedperceptions of the integrity of the process nor how subjects would interpret the outcome of the2024 presidential election.