“I Voted!”: Exploring the Roots of Over-Reported Voter Turnout Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

When taking a survey, Americans often claim to have voted despite not actually doing so.

Researchers have typically attributed this phenomenon to social desirability bias, often linked to

higher education and greater awareness of the importance of voting, but some also suggest it may

result from misremembering or simply be an artifact of the questionnaire. However, most studies

ignore other demographic variables and rarely examine how their interactions affect misreporting.

I argue that more educated Black and Latino people undergo a dual socialization process as a

result of their intersectional identities, leading to compounded social pressures, thus making them

more likely to misreport their voting behavior compared to white and Asian respondents. To test

this, I leverage the validated voter data in the Cooperative Election Study (CES), using the

cumulative file covering federal elections from 2008 to 2024, to examine sensitivity to norms in

different racial groups across various education levels. I find that education does not have a

unique, statistically significant effect on misreporting among Black and Latino populations,

although I argue that this is a result of data limitations and not a flaw in the theory. The findings

indicate that drawing results about different identities’ impact on misreporting from

self-administered surveys may obscure the social pressures in misreporting, especially when such

pressures are not directly present or activated.

Table of Contents

Literature Review Theory Method Results Discussion References Appendix

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Political Science
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, General
Keyword	Misreporting Race and ethnicity Self-reported voting Voter turnout Survey measurement error Validated voting
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Bernard Fraga, Emory University
Committee Members	Jeffrey K. Staton, Emory University Kiela Crabtree, Emory University

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