Abstract

The use of computers to record and tabulate votes has been increasingly controversial since the passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002. This paper traces that controversy, exploring whether the elite debate about technology has affected popular attitudes. The empirical focus here is public opinion about voting technologies from 2012 to 2019. We find a consistent status-quo bias in attitudes about computer equipment — users of direct-recording electronic devices (DREs) tend to favor DREs and users of opscans tend to favor opscans. On top of this bias, DREs have tended to be regarded as superior to both opscans and hand-counted paper over the time covered in the paper, although this advantage has recently declined. The decline in the relative preference for DREs had been greatest among survey respondents who pay the greatest attention to news and public affairs.