Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Since the 2000 presidential election and the passage of the 2002 Help
America Vote Act, there has been a growing interest among political science
and election law scholars in the counting of ballots and election
administration. Some close elections are decided by a small number of
contested ballots, for which the determination of "voter intent" is
seemingly subjective. Using an experimental design, this project simulates
the process of counting optical-scan ballots during a manual recount after a
close election. Respondents are provided with fourteen disputed ballots, all
of which are modeled on disputed ballots from the 2008 Minnesota Senate
election. Respondents are asked to judge the validity of each ballot, and to
determine the voter's intended vote choice, if they deem it possible. We
draw upon the theoretical insights of the motivated perception literature in
hypothesizing that a respondent's partisan biases will influence their
decision to count the ballot for a Democratic or Republican candidate, or to
reject the ballot. We also test whether vague, versus clear, ballot
counting guidelines increase the likelihood that motivated perception will
occur. If partisan biases influence respondents decisions, it is likely
that partisan biases will also influence election administrators during a
hand-recount of disputed ballots. Such a finding of partisan bias among
election administrators, or lack thereof, will be of particular interest to
state and federal policy makers responsible for codifying recount
procedures.

Publication Type: Roundtable Discussion
Abstract: The International Crane Foundation’s (ICF) Annual Midwest Crane Count is an environmental education citizen science program. This project looked at its past, its accomplishments, and its future. Find out what this program does for cranes – and for people.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Part of a more general project devoted to the sociography of EU legal elites (Polilexes), this intervention presents the preliminary results of the first quantitative survey on EU lawyers. Focused exclusively on lawyers who have been pleading to the European Court of Justice, it questions various critical transformations of Euro-law practice since the outset of this jurisdiction (1952) : the early concentration of legal practice around a limited number of ³repeat players² and law firms, the autonomization of a specific branch of law as well as the progressive differentiation of the Euro-law market into a number of relatively specialized areas of practice (anti-trust, freedom of circulation).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper is a respecification of counting as an achievement, as localized social and material work rather than a universally understood ‘just so,’ or a uniform mathematical practice that can be applied unambiguously to any number of counting situations. The activity of human chromosome counting, from the late 1800’s to 1956, provides an apt frame through which to examine counting as an epistemic topic. From E.B Wilson’s The Cell in Development and Inheritance, 1896, we learn that, ‘in man the number is said to be 16, and the same number is characteristic of the onion.’ By 1954, after the number had held steady for thirty years, Sachs declared that ‘…the diploid chromosome number of 48 in man can therefore now be considered as an established fact.’ Any textbook since 1956 assures us that there are 46 chromosomes in the normal human cell nucleus. I will show, with detailed reference to the vexed history of chromosome counting, that the work of making objects countable, of preparing the field for this seemingly simple assignment of arithmetic numbers, and of convincing relevant communities that a count is certain, is inexorably context-bound, social, contingent, and anchored in relevant knowledge projects. Moreover, the labor required to render entities countable does epistemic work: counted objects acquire properties, such as individuality and membership in a group, which they did not have prior to the counting.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed