DATA SOURCES
The absentee ballots examined in this chapter offer a unique insight into crossover voting. There were more than two hundred and fifty thousand absentee ballots cast in L.A. County in the June 1998 primary election, which constituted more than 20 percent of all the ballots cast in the election. The absentee ballots were reasonably representative of the full election-day canvass. (See the appendix and table 7.10, at the end of this chapter,
One possible limitation with the absentee ballots, however, is that absentee voters fill out ballots early in the campaign. They would therefore have been at a disadvantage in planning strategic votes, because information that could have aided in that planning—such as media coverage of campaigns and the reporting of poll results—intensifies closer to election day. Thus, whatever amount of strategic voting we see here may represent the minimum found in the election. This factor could be offset, however, by the fact that absentee voters had plenty of time with the ballot in hand and perhaps used it to consider all their options. That extra time could also mean that absentee voters were the least likely (all else being equal) to pick the first candidate on a list whose name they recognized. Hence, the amount of crossover voting to support incumbents found among absentee voters was probably at least matched by the overall electorate. The final vote tallies support this conjecture as well.
A second possible limitation with the absentee ballots is that we cannot measure any possible campaign-specific effects that could have affected voters' decisions, such as a vote-by-mail drive in a particular district. However, we compensate for this possible limitation by examining more than fifty state and local contests and by observing voters across a range of electoral scenarios. Our conclusions about how voters behaved in any given electoral scenario (e.g., with the presence of an incumbent or of a competitive race) are drawn from crossover rates in a number of such cases.