AMERICAN POLITICS QUARTERLY / APRIL 2000Wattenberg et al. / ANALYSIS OF VOTER ROLLOFF HOW VOTING IS LIKE TAKING AN SAT TEST An Analysis of American Voter Rolloff

Millions of American voters fail to complete their ballots each election year. These voters pres-ent a puzzle: After having incurred the costs of going to the polls, why do they choose not to vote on some of the items on the ballot? This paper considers voter rolloff between presidential and House races in an effort to understand the reasons why some voters abstain selectively. We con-sider this question by analyzing House rolloff based on aggregate data from the 1990s and national survey data from the 1980s. The results indicate that voters skip House contests not because they are lacking in education or members of minority groups, but rather because they do not have enough information to cast a vote. This finding offers new insight into how rolloff voters approach a ballot: They treat voting as if it were a test, picking out the questions that they can answer. One of the unique aspects of the electoral process in the United States is the sheer number of decisions American voters are asked to make when they go to the polls. For example, in 1994, California vot-ers were asked to choose among opposing candidates for 11 state or federal offices, whether to retain three state Supreme Court judges, and whether to approve 10 propositions. California provides an extreme example, but every state asks voters to make more decisions than is typical in countries with parliamentary systems. With so many choices to make, it is no wonder that American electoral turnout rates are among the lowest in the world (see Boyd, 1981; Dalton & Watten-berg, 1993). In any single election, American voters face much higher information costs than the citizens of almost any other democracy in the world