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 ye ar. These voters present 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 b allot? This paper considers voter rolloff between presidential and House ra ces in an effort to understand the reasons why some voters abstain selectiv ely We consider this question by analyzing House rolloff based on aggregate data from the 1990s and national survey data from the 1980s. The results i ndicate that voters skip House contests not because they are lacking in edu cation or members of minority groups, but rather because they do not have e nough 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, p icking out the questions that they can answer.