Alex Woodruff '17 Presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association

Alex Woodruff '17 presented a research paper, “Does Randomized Ballot Order Increase Invalid Votes?” at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (Chicago) on April 8, 2016. Alex’s co-author, Professor of Government and Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies Yusaku Horiuchi, taught Alex in a QSS class on data visualization.  Horiuchi's and Woodruff's paper uses data from more than 40,000 polling places in Australia and estimates in the context of Australia’s recent Lower House elections the impact of completely randomized ballot positions on informal/invalid votes. The data wrangling and analysis for this paper were carried out in R, which is used in many QSS courses, and Alex’s conference attendance was supported by QSS.