When
Please join us for our Fall 2026 Colloquium series!
Help us welcome Dr. Chris Fowler to present
The Voter Roll ‘Crisis’: How uncertainty in our count of eligible and registered voters is used to justify (baseless) claims of voter fraud and why we can’t just ‘get the numbers right.’
Abstract:
Across the country, lawsuits and news stories have seized on apparent discrepancies between state voter rolls and estimates of the eligible population, fueling calls for reform, claims of election fraud, and purges that regularly disenroll legitimate voters. Election returns give researchers in the United States a nearly perfect record of votes cast down to very small geographic units. Nevertheless, almost every claim we make about participation, from turnout rates to the representativeness of the electorate to the effects of redistricting, depends on a far less certain denominator; the number of people who are eligible to vote. In this talk I examine why that denominator is so difficult to measure and why we cannot simply 'get the numbers right.' I distinguish between the very different constraints on surveys, which try to arrive at a count, and on voter rolls, which act as a precondition for exercising a crucial right of citizenship. While estimating an accurate count has its own challenges, wrongly removing an eligible voter carries a much higher cost, and so rolls are designed to err on the side of inclusion. Comparing Census data and voter rolls at the state, county, and tract level, I show how survey design, state law, and population characteristics combine to produce extreme differences in estimates, including entire states where registered voters outnumber the estimated eligible population. These patterns offer a sharp note of caution to anyone who would mistake uncertainty that is built into our data for evidence of error or malfeasance. They also point to the hurdles faced by local election officials tasked with getting the numbers right in an already tense election climate.
This talk is free to attend and takes place in room S107 of the ENR2 building on Friday, November 13, 2026 from 3:30-5pm. All are welcome!
This talk is cosponsored by The School of Government and Public Policy.
