I completed this project as part of the Introduction to Statistics class at UC Berkeley alongside my peers Eliot Arntz, Brandon Law, and Rina Palta. I want to express my gratitude for their valuable contributions to the project!
While every U.S. citizen over the age of 18 has the right to vote, many factors can impede individuals from exercising their voting rights. In recent elections, political parties have argued over voting accessibility including mail-in ballots and whether to close polling places while voters are still in line. Generally, Democrats have argued for more accessibility and fewer voting restrictions, while Republicans have argued for the opposite. This alignment flows from how the parties see voting access benefiting them electorally. Since the 2020 election, when many jurisdictions increased access to things like mail-in ballots, the debate has intensified.
Do Democratic voters or Republican voters experience more difficulty voting?
Source: https://electionstudies.org/data-center/2022-pilot-study/
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The t-test on our data yielded a p-value of .025, well below the .05 threshold for statistical significance. Our t-score of -2.24 with 1136 degrees of freedom suggests that the difference in means is fairly large, though not huge, relative to the variability within the groups and its negative nature suggests that Democratic voters experience more difficulty in voting compared to Republican voters.
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In practical terms, approximately 29 percent of Republicans in our sample experienced some difficulty voting, compared to 35 percent of Democrats, a 6-percent difference.