The abstract of a paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via):
Contextual priming: Where people vote affects how they vote
American voters are assigned to vote at a particular polling location (e.g., a church, school, etc.). We show these assigned polling locations can influence how people vote. Analysis of a recent general election demonstrates that people who were assigned to vote in schools were more likely to support a school funding initiative. This effect persisted even when controlling for voters’ political views, demographics, and unobservable characteristics of individuals living near schools. A follow-up experiment using random assignment suggests that priming underlies these effects, and that they can occur outside of conscious awareness. These findings underscore the subtle power of situational context to shape important real-world decisions.
Interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, one of the authors of the study remarked:
“We looked at a particular issue, but the same types of effects could potentially occur for parties,” said Dr Jonah Berger of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, who did the study with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and Stanford University, Stanford.
“This is particularly so if there is a connection (conscious or otherwise) between polling locations and certain parties, or the issues they stand for, then people who vote in those locations might be influenced,” he says.
“In the US, for example, there is a link between religion and Conservatives, and though we did not test this possibility, it is possible that voting in churches could potentially lead people who are on the fence towards supporting that party.”
Of course, as usual, further research (more funding) is needed, but still….
Front page
come now, you know why as well as i do
let’s not pretend. we’re a “republic” only so long as churchies allow us to be. which isn’t very far. myself, i’ve voted in churches more or less more whole life, and never receive an answer as to why they are polling places. oddly, i’m seem to be the only one who ever asks.
Separation of church and state is so last year
The Constitution is so passe.
We are all post-partisan now, Lambert!
Obama has shown us the way…”called to serve,” “called to bring change,” “guided by his faith”—maybe the churches can get MORE funding now so that ALL the elections can take place there. I mean, why have a town hall when we have churches? Save on energy!
As the politician Obama says: “We do what we do because God is with us.” Maybe we can get all the election-holding churches to look like the one in Obama’s political flyer. Then the church and state would be as one.
all quotes here from: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2…
Whether you’re religious or not, I think Obama’s writings above are against the ideas of separate religion and the state—and the Constitution.
Meh
I’ll save judgment until the church experiment is actually done. But it might work both ways, ya know. There are many progressive churches that have voting take place there. Maybe we’ll have to reevaluate that if the data support it, but it’s hardly some nefarious scheme. If we start harping on this, then maybe the conservatives will start saying we need to stop voting in schools. Where will it stop.
logistics
It may be that in some precincts there are no other large buildings that are suitable for polling.
Exactly
I think its paranoid to think that this is evidence of some scary plot by religious groups.
My polling place is a school run by a church
which explains my confusion
————————————————————————
“Just say NO! to Kool-aid.”
For years my polling place
was in an art gallery … and I couldn’t be more supportive of funding for the arts. Hmmm.
mine is in a church too--MCC tho, which is better--
there’s not a single sign or poster or anything god-ish visible in the room where we vote — i think they purposely strip it before primaries and elections, which is good.
if i had a public school or public library nearby it would be definitely be there, but there aren’t any close enough.
I know that accessibility is part the requirements to be eligible as a polling place, and i guess churches often have ramps and ease of access?
it could be that if it's in a Baptist church or something,
people who go there every week might end up voting more regularly simply because it’s “their place”, while others might be more hesitant simply because of where the polling place is—“hostile/foreign territory” sorta?
You guys have church polling places?
Weird. I don’t know of any in TN (there may be some but the idea seems foreign) but then again our state Constitution used to ban religious officials from holding office for both the good of the church and the good of the state! Hehe. At any rate, mine have always been at schools though I know we’ve got a bunch at Volunteer Fire Depts. and community centers.
EDIT TO ADD: I went to Nashville’s Election Commission just for fun and it seems Nashville uses Churches. Maybe it’s a city thing since Churches often have space in the cities from long ago?
usually it's public schools here in NYC,
but in non-residential/industrial/fringe neighborhoods and out-of-the-way places, there aren’t any, so…
My whole voting life before moving to this apt was always in public schools, and when we were little, we would go with our mom while she voted—also in a public school.
= 1000 words
You mean like this?
Voting is a bit like praying
in a Buddhist sort of way, the pieces of paper ritually marked with requests and tendered to the ether. I’m opposed to touchscreens for that reason alone, the loss of ritual; we should take voting more seriously, with more of a to-do and some kind of demonstrativeness.
I’d be all for purple fingers, if only to shame those who did not bother.