ELECTIONSMaking Each Vote Count
MIT Ph.D. candidate Jacob Jaffe uses data science to identify and solve problems in election administration. A key takeaway from his ensemble of studies is that “while it’s relatively rare that elections are bad, we shouldn’t think that we’re good to go,” he says. “Instead, we need to be asking under what conditions do things get bad, and how can we make them better.”
Graduate student Jacob Jaffe wants to improve the administration of American elections. To do that, he is posing “questions in political science that we haven’t been asking enough,” he says, “and solving them with methods we haven’t been using enough.”
Considerable research has been devoted to understanding “who votes, and what makes people vote or not vote,” says Jaffe. He is training his attention on questions of a different nature: Does providing practical information to voters about how to cast their ballots change how they will vote? Is it possible to increase the accuracy of vote-counting, on a state-by-state and even precinct-by-precinct basis? How do voters experience polling places? These problems form the core of his dissertation.
Taking advantage of the resources at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, where he serves as a researcher, Jaffe conducts novel field experiments to gather highly detailed information on local, state, and federal elections, and analyzes this trove with advanced statistical techniques. Whether investigating the probability of miscounts in voting, or the possibility of changing a voter’s mode of voting, Jaffe intends to strengthen the scaffolding that supports representative government. “Elections are both theoretically and normatively important; they’re the basis of our belief in the moral rightness of the state to do the things the state does,” he says.
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For one of his keystone projects, Jaffe seized a unique opportunity to run a big field experiment. In summer 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he emailed 80,000 Floridians instructions on how to vote in an upcoming primary by mail. His email contained a link enabling recipients to fill out two simple questions to receive a ballot. “I wanted to learn if this was an effective method for getting people to vote by mail, and I proved it is, statistically,” he says. “This is important to know because if elections are held in times when we might need people to vote nonlocally or vote using one method over another — if they’re displaced by a hurricane or another emergency, for instance — I learned that we can effect a new vote mode practically and quickly.”
