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♪ KU choral chant ♪
Chelsie: I'm Chelsie Bright.
I study political science and I'm from
Walnut Shade, Missouri.
I work as a research assistant in the department and I also
work as a graduate assistant for the McNair Scholars Program.
What we're working on this fall is we had this unique
situation where Kansas passed a law in 2011 legislating that
all voters had to present a photo I.D.
in order to be able to vote.
However, they didn't specify exactly how counties were to go
about informing voters of this and so what we saw is that we
had some counties who took different approaches than others.
So for example, Douglas County took the approach that they
wanted to make sure all votes were included and they provided
means for voters to have provisional ballots and really
stress in their advertising of this law that you would be
able to vote somehow.
As opposed to other counties who just said you have to have
I.D. or you cannot vote and then we even had some
counties that really didn't do much of anything.
And so what we're wanting to do is compare these different
advertising strategies to see if there's a difference in turn
out based on the type of strategy that was used.
So we're using a statistical technique to match counties that
are identical in every way except for the advertising
strategy used.
So it could be that most voters in the state of Kansas do
have a current photo I.D.
and there aren't enough individuals to make a difference.
So what county clerks end up doing with the data really
depends on what the results are.
So if we find, for example, that there is a big difference
between advertising strategies that would be great if they
would incorporate that and obviously if we find that not
doing anything is the same as doing something then counties
can cut costs not printing off all the signs and information
and sending out materials.
That's one of the reasons we're doing this project is to find
out if having a photo I.D.
has an effect on turn out or not.
I love the faculty in our department,
they're fantastic to work with.
They're very willing to take graduate students under their
wing and mentor them which is great for me not only because I
get full exposure to the research process but also because I
get to learn directly working with them.