INDEX:
°Campaign Finance
     °Campaign Finance Reform
     °Soft Money and Issue Advocacy
     °Consumer Price Index and Campaign Costs
°Campaign 2004
°Campaign 2000
°Candidates for Office
    °Candidate issue positions and agendas
    °Candidate Emergence Study
°Cartoons
°Census information
°Contract with America
°Conventions
    °Delegates to the national party conventions
°Cook Political Report
°Democracy Corps
°Directory of Political Parties
°Election Laws and Rules
°Election 2000
° Election Reform
    °Florida Ballot Project
    °Voting Machines
°Elections - U.S.
    °Election Forecasting
    °Election Atlases
     °Election Maps
     °Election Terminology
     °Recent Elections
     °State of Missouri
°Elections - worldwide and outside the U.S.
°Electoral Systems
°Federal Data Sources
°General Informational Sources
°History of Parties
°International political resources
°Journals
°Missouri, State of
°Party Organizations in the U.S.
    °Democrats
    °Republicans
    °Third Parties
    °State Parties
    °Party Conventions and Platforms
°Party Voting Index
°Polls and Polling
    °General Sources of Polls
    °Specific polls
    °How to interpret polls
    °Statistical basis of polling
°Polls on Presidential Election 2004
°Primaries and Primary Elections
    °Frontloading of primaries
    °Regional Primary Elections Plan
    °Blanket Primaries
°Proportional Representation
°Redistricting
    Texas 2003-04 redistricting
°Reference Sources
°"Responsible Parties" report
°Thomas Nast - for fellow fans and students of the great 19th century American political cartoonist
°Voters
    °Absentee Voting
    °American National Election Studies on Voters (NES)
    °Voter Registration
    °Motor Voter law and impact
    °Voting in Cape Girardeau
    °Young Voters
°Voter Technology Project (CalTech and MIT)
°Voter Turnout
°Year 2000 Political Events Calendar

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Campaign Finance:                                Top

     General sources are cited per Grace York at U of Michigan Documents Center - Statistical Resources on the Web--Political Science--Campaign Finances.  For comprehensive primary information, see Federal Election Commission and Federal Election Commission data.  An index of links to those who follow the money is Public Campaign - Dollars in Action.  Also see Follow the Money; and Opensecrets.org from Center for Responsive Politics, the most comprehensive site available except for the Federal Election Commission itself.  Its All Presidential Candidates Total Raised and Spent shows who has raised or spent what in campaign money.  Links explain bundling, soft money, FEC rules and regulations for campaign money, and other arcane points in the complicated money picture.  See also Project Vote-Smart's Candidates and Elected Officials - Project Vote Smart under "Campaign Finances."

Campaign Finance Reform:  These are extensive, as this subject is undoubtedly the single primary target of systematic reform now.  Campaign Finance Information Center has extensive tracking of the cash flow.  The Joyce Foundation's The Joyce Foundation Money and Politics Program Area backs this site.  See also Public Campaign -- Real Campaign Finance Reform; reform articles are at http://www.usc.edu/dept/CR F/FATA/newrnewt.htm. (QUESTIONABLE LINK)

    The Brookings Institution is prominent among analysts on behalf of reform.  See Brookings Institution - Campaign Finance Reform.  Anthony Corrado and colleagues' book-length analysis is available in Acrobat format, from www.brook.edu - Campaign Finance Reform -A Sourcebook.

    On a racial factor in campaign money, see The Color of Money.
    The Center for Public Integrity is another source of articles devoted to exposing various intrusions of private power via money into the public business of campaigns and governance.  A reform organization specializing in the courtroom side of this is National Voting Rights Institute.  The most extensive reform links once again are from Center for Responsive Politics, at CRP Links and Resources.

Soft Money and Issue Advocacy:  The "hot corner" campaign reform issue in year 2000 is the recent trend to escape financing limits by using soft money to political parties for issue advocacy that freely crosses the line into campaign advertising.   This first assumed major importance in the cycle of 1993-94, accelerated rapidly in 1995-96, and by 1999-2000 has become epidemic.   CRP Political Parties - Soft Money describes soft money at Background on Soft Money and has a searchable database for tracking soft money donors in both the 1999-2000 campaign cycle and now 2000-2001, at Parties Soft Money Donor Search.  A compendium of source materials from the Department of Communications at the University of Iowa is U. Iowa Communication Studies Resources Advertising Articles & Papers.   A list of other articles from the Annenberg Public Policy Center is at APPC Media and the Dialogue of Democracy.

    Issue advocacy is intensively studied in the Brennan Center Democracy Program with its May 2000 release of Buying Time.  This systematic study demonstrates that soft money collected by the national parties is converted into campaign ads masquerading as party-building activities and issue advertising.   The Annenberg Public Policy Center paper by Jeffrey D. Stanger and Douglas G. Rivlin entitled "Study Finds Party Issue Ads Raised Level of Attack During General Election" is a corroboration; locale is Issue Ads 97-98 Issue Ad Analysis.  Per the Supreme Court's 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, soft money without spending limits cannot be used for "express advocacy" of election or defeat of a specifically named candidate by using the words "vote for _____" or "vote against ______."   The Federal Elections Commission discusses express advocacy at Independent Expenditures.  The Stanger and Rivlin analysis demonstrates that political parties used the majority of their soft money in the 1997-98 cycle for "candidate-centered advertising."  These ads "couch their arguments in terms of candidates for office that either support or oppose the advocacy organization's or party's policy stance" (Stanger and Rivlin 1998) but do not use the words "vote for" or "vote against" when naming a candidate.

    Other reform groups have uncovered attack commercials against candidates in guise of issue advertising.  Issue Ads and Shays-Meehan from Public Citizen, for example, shows a flagrant abuse as part of its campaign for Shays-Meehan, the House of Representatives counterpart proposal to the better known senatorial McCain-Feingold measure.  Such ads have a history dating to a spate of 1980 attacks upon several Democratic Senators by the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NICPAC).

    Some organizations do run authentic issue ads.  A leading defender of issue advocacy advertising is the ACLU; see ACLU in Congress 09-30-97 -- Questions and Answers on Issue Advocacy for their definition and defense of issue ads.  The ACLU opposed the senatorial McCain-Feingold reform measure in its 1997 rendition because the bill aimed to broaden express advocacy's meaning to rule out thinly disguised issue ads aimed at influencing an election outcome. They hold that whatever prohibits partisan use of issue advertising would also prohibit authentic advocacy group use of the same.

    Consumer Price Index and Campaign Costs:  The Consumer Price Index Home Page demonstrates that in the past thirty years of the campaign finance system, the overall cost of living has risen about 400 percent--and campaign costs themselves have risen far more than that.  To see the effects, consult Professor Robert Sahr's Inflation conversion factors for dollars 1665-est. 2012 to dollars of CPI and 1995 to 2002.   A specific indicator of escalation of campaign cost relative to permissible hard money expenditures for 1975 to 2002, is located at:    http://www.orst.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/lm74cm.htm

Campaign 2004:                                 Top

    C-SPAN - Primaries and Caucuses has the 2004 presidential primary and caucus schedule.  C-SPAN Road the the White House has weekly video coverage plus contextual background, including the primary calendar, candidate biographies, and candidate websites.

    Washingtonpost.com Elections 2004 has articles, candidate profiles, a primary calendar, and links out to polls, institutions, and previous elections of 2000 and 2002.   The New York Times Campaigns has a similar set of profiles, including Election 2004:  Candidate Profiles, 2004 Elections Calendar, and Political Money Line.

Campaign 2000:                                          Top

    Start with The New York Times Campaign Resources for an excellent set of links to New York Times articles, various candidate websites, C-Span Video and other video resources, and Polls.   Washington Post fans should go to OnPolitics Elections 2000 for similar range of coverage (if they can stand all the advertising clutter).  Those preferring excellent coverage from abroad should look at BBC News - Election News; included is a section on Congress from BBC News: More than just the White House.
    C-SPAN has C-SPAN Campaign 2000 Advertising with subsections for current 2000 ads, plus an archive of Real Player clips dating from the original presidential television commercial by the Eisenhower campaign in 1952 up to those of 1988.  A Campaign 2000 Video Search is also provided.  C-SPAN Road To The Whitehouse Archive has background on campaign-related events dating from May 1997; good for students of the "invisible primary."

   Elections USA is another comprehensive site, with links to all major news organizations.  Excellent for simulcast viewers.  They have current news information, and should have more as the elections come closer.

   The main site American Research Group Inc. has a calculator for sample size and margin of error, as well as a great deal of poll data relating specifically to New Hampshire.

    Finally, see Campaigns and Elections; this journal for campaign specialists and students has interesting material, but of course it's restricted to subscribers.  Their Political Oddsmaker is of interest, however.

Following are some other sites:
Project Vote Smart - A Voter's Self-Defense System:  The first site for intelligent politics and elections followers everywhere in the U.S.  From this index page, jump first to Candidates and Elected Officials for comprehensive candidate information, or go to Candidate Public Statements for search-based profiles of presidential primary and other contestants.  The 2000 presidential primary list is at Candidates for President in 2000 - Sorted by Name - Project Vote Smart. Highly recommended for political junkies and smart voters alike.

Freedom Channel -- American Politics on Demand:  This recent site offers direct videos of the presidential candidates speaking on important campaign issues.  Also included are Senate, House and state gubernatorial candidates.  This is direct face-the-camera video with the candidate and the watcher/listener, unmediated except for use (presumably) of a teleprompter.  Sponsors are Doug Bailey and Roger Craver; Freedom Channel is a nonprofit venture supported by Carnegie Corp., The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and National Journal. (BROKEN LINK)

The Democracy Network:  By the League of Women Voters (League of Women Voters of the United States);  2000 candidacies are still archived by state.

C-SPAN Campaign 2000:  This includes C-SPAN Campaign 2000 Video Search, a wide-ranging archive on Campaign 2000.

CNNAllPolitics - Election 2000:  Probably the site of choice for intensive daily politics news readers.  It also offers a very extensive set of candidate advertisements via QuickPlayer.

Democracy in Action--P2000:  Race for the White House:   George Washington University's excellent site features a sequence of 12 buttons covering the events from 1999 "invisible primary" shakeout of candidates, through the year 2000, ending with 20 January 2001 inauguration of a 43rd President of the United States.  Highly recommended for its good calendar of events.

Politics1 Presidency 2000 Archives:  A good commercial site with the 2000 election archived, but with current material at Politics1, as well as extensive news links at Political News and Resources for anyone seeking current events coverage from U.S. sources.  Also includes a handful of major foreign news sites such as BBC.

WhiteHouse 2000 The Campaign from Avi Bass at Northern Illinois University; a very varied site, interesting links both current and archival, with every conceivable link.

Candidates for Office:                          Top

Candidate issue positions and agendas:  See Project Vote Smart; Public Agenda; PBS Democracy Project.

Candidate Emergence Study: The Candidate Emergence Study Website has the several major papers authored so far from this important National Science Foundation funded study conducted by Principal Investigators Walter Stone and L. Sandy Maisel.  See in particular The Politics of Government Funded Research.

Cartoons:  Never out of fashion where politics is concerned; see, for example, Campaign 2000 --by all of the top Cartoonists!  For the historically minded, see below at Thomas Nast.

Census information:  Small-scale bickering and large-scale dollars and power hinge on debate over application of the 2000 Census.  See 2000 Census Debate for a Brookings review of the current squabble.  The main court case so far is  Department of Commerce v. United States House (98-404) at Cornell's Legal Information Institute.  The major dispute is whether to allow sampling.  The U.S. Census Bureau proposed it to counter problems of the 1990 Census.  Democrats supported the proposal and Republicans opposed it, for political rather than technical reasons.  Brookings Census Sampling page cited above includes compendia of positions for and against this practice.

Contract with America:  Important in the 1994 election cycle in the U.S. House; see Republican Contract with America.

Conventions, National Nominating                                    Top

Delegates to the national party conventions:

Cook Political Report:                               Top

The Cook Political Report analyzes elections after the fact, but also issues detailed race-by-race forecasts.

Democracy Corps:                    Top

Democracy Corps has Strategic Analyses and National Surveys.  These are survey-based reports from three Democratic Party strategists and pollsters - James Carville, Stanley Greenberg, and Bob Shrum.

Directory of Political Parties:                                                      Top

Politics1 - Guide to American Political Parties from Politics1.com is a comprehensive profile of current American parties both large and small, well-known and obscure.  Each description is linked to the party's webpage or pages.  Listed first are the two major parties, followed by alphabetically listed third parties. Many internal links exist to important persons in each third party.

Election Laws and Rules:                                         Top

    On proportional representation, see The Center for Voting and Democracy, an advocacy group for P.R. adoption in American general elections.

Election 2000:                             Top

    For annotated links, Elections 2000 from U of Michigan Documents Center is a good starting point. The Elections 2000 - Florida Recount has the Florida Election Results; the major legal cases including the Florida rulings and the U.S. Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision of 12 December 2000; the News Media; the Candidate Speeches; and the Civil Rights Probe.

    Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections has 2000 results for both the primaries and the general election, in both data and graphic form.

 Election Reform:                      Top

    Election 2000 Materials from Stanford Law School's Robert Crown Law Library has comprehensive coverage of the many legal controversies associated with more than 1 million uncounted presidential ballots, including 186,000 in the State of Florida alone, during the 2000 election for president.  Election 2000 Materials- Florida is the subfile compilation for that state.  Five other states are also sub-listed.

    The need for reform after the 2000 presidential election is obvious.  Proposals are plentiful.  An Agenda for Election Reform from Thomas Mann at Brookings Institution has a brief introductory file and full PDF file recommending national voter registration lists, elimination of the demonstrably failed punch card ballots, and several other reforms for which the Florida 2000 experience provides abundant evidence of cause.  They also have links to other major sources on information on systematic election reform.  These are listed immediately below, by the paragraph.

    The National Conference of State Legislatures has NCSLnet Search Election Reform Legislation; this is a database for each state with a flexible search engine for numerous categories of reform.  It is the only comprehensive database of this type on the web as of November 2001.

    Federal Election Reform Network has the Federal Election Reform Network Final Report of the Commission (full) on 114-page PDF file.  Other links include Federal Election Reform Network Public Hearings and Federal Election Reform Network Task Forces.

    The Constitution Project's Election Reform -- Main Page includes "A Fact Sheet on Election Reform."

    League of Women Voters: Election Administration Reform is an introductory page to their full report, available in PDF at www.lwv.org.

    The Federal Election Commission at FEC - About Elections and Voting  has a subsection entitled "The Administrative Structure of U.S. Elections" with information on ballot types, constitutional and statutory provisions, and History of the Voting System Standards Program.  The FEC's Administrative Structure of State Election Offices has details of state by state handling of elections.

    Florida Ballot Project:                    Top

NORC Florida Ballots Project from National Opinion Research Center was first reported to the public on 12 November 2001.  The NORC file includes NORC Florida Ballots Project Sponsors (with links to each), General Project Information,  Press Releases, Methodology, Ballot Types, Data Files, and an RTF file answering Frequently Asked Questions.

    The NORC project covered 175,010 previously uncounted ballots out of 6,139,556 ballots officially submitted from the 67 Florida counties in the 2000 presidential contest.  That was "more than 99 percent of the approximately 176,446 that were considered overvoted or undervoted in the certified vote total" of the State of Florida (New York Times, How the Consortium of News Organizations Conducted the Ballot Review).  Almost two-thirds (113,000) were overvotes (voting two or more times for president), the rest (62,000) being undervotes (no machine-read vote for president).  NORC's introduction says, "The goal of the project is not to declare a “winner,” but rather to carefully examine the ballots to assess the relative reliability of the three major types of ballot systems used in Florida." (NORC Florida Ballots Project)  NORC used three coders on all undervotes to further their objective of determining the problems associated with each major type of ballot (which varied considerably among Florida's 67 counties).

    Needless to say, all news headlines addressed who might have won, under what circumstances.  The results were profoundly indecisive, showing again that neither party in November 2000 correctly knew a way to ensure that its own horse would finish ahead.  For example, "A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.  ...  But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots." (New York Times, Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote).  In other words, had Gore gotten what he wanted with recounts in four heavily Democratic counties, he'd have probably lost anyway; and had either Bush or Gore sought and gotten a statewide recount, maybe Gore would have won instead of Bush, who prevailed officially by a 537 vote plurality out of 5,963,110 votes officially counted for one of the ten presidential candidates in Florida (see Florida Department of State - Election Results).

    As for Palm Beach County with its uncelebrated butterfly ballot, this study confirmed that the ballot's flawed design prompted numerous overvotes combining a Gore vote with one for Buchanan.  Keep in mind, of course, that those who mistakenly voted only for Buchanan, cannot be part of the 175 thousand uncounted ballot.  They did count, toward Buchanan's official statewide harvest of 17,484 votes (see Florida Department of State - Election Results).  That's shown in more detail in Law and Data: The Butterfly Ballot Episode from PS Online, March 2001.

    Election 2000 Materials - Florida (from Stanford Law School) covers the many Florida briefs and court cases of 2000 in well-organized sequence.

    Voting Machines:                   Top

Residual Votes Attributable to Technology:  An Assessment of the Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment (in PDF) is part of The Caltech/MIT Voting Project and is shown at co-author MIT Political Science Stephen Ansolabehere.

Elections - U.S.:                     Top

Election Forecasting, Years 2004 and 2000:  A poll-based handicapping of the 7 November 2000 presidential Electoral College result was to review state-by-state polls.  Three public website sources did this in 2000.  We should expect the same and more in 2004. (RDR - October 20, 2003).

    American Research Group Inc. in 2000 had summations of state-by-state polls of both major party presidential candidates along with Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and "others," with samples of 600 for each state and D.C.   State-based sampling error was 4% and the weighted national sample (with 30,600 respondents) was a miniscule 1%--extremely useful in a close election like this one.  The main site also had detailed profiles of states and an archive of earlier poll results this year.  The data could be downloaded; very useful for students of election forecasting models that often used poll results as a variable in their models.  Each state's sample is subdivided by party and by gender.

    Mason-Dixon - Latest News & Polls also had polls highlighting the close states, with links to newspaper articles based on these.  Some covered congressional as well as presidential poll results.

    PollingReport.com - Public Opinion Online included presidential tracking polls at WH2000 Trial Heats.  Candidate evaluations were at WH2000 The Candidates.  Congressional information was, and is, at Congress.

Election Results - U.S. national results:

    ° FEC - About Elections and Voting from the Federal Election Commission includes "Recent Election Results" on both presidency and Congress.  FEDERAL ELECTIONS 2002 Table of Contents has the primary and general election votes for the U.S. Congress through 2002.

    ° Historical Information-Office of the Clerk-Election Statistics has official congressional returns for 1920 through 2002 in PDF, and all from 1992 in hypertext.

    °Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections has all quadrennial presidential national results dating from 1789.  Each result is skillfully but slowly presented in frames with popular vote and Electoral College given in percentage as well as numerical terms.  Third parties are included; and the "%VAP" entry shows national voter turnout.  Colored maps indicate where each major party candidate was strongest or weakest (by state; also see below under Election Results - Maps).  State-by-state data down to the counties and congressional districts is available from 1960 onward; one can then use the maps to compare successive elections.

    ° Presidential Election Maps from the University of Virginia Library Geographic Information Center has popular and Electoral College results plotted on easily readable maps for 1860 through 1996.  The 2000 election is at  Geostat Center General Info.

    ° Elections Central- A History of Presidential Elections has excellent contextual detail for interpretation of the 2000 election.

Election Atlases:  Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

Election Maps:  See as a general source from the University of Texas, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.  Within the U.S., go to its Maps of the United States.  See also Electoral Vote Maps for 1992 and 1996 with accompanying table showing which states went for whom in order of vote plurality (in those two presidential elections).

Election Terminology:  See IFES - ElectionGuide.Org - Definitions of Election Terms, including Electoral Systems.

Recent Elections:  The best way to understand the distribution of votes in 2000 and beyond is to know well what happened in 1992 and 1996.  See Electoral Vote Maps for 1992 and 1996 from George Washington University.  Scroll down to "Where The Candidates Did Best in 1996 (Percent of Total Vote)" for help.

State of Missouri:    SOS, Missouri - Elections has returns from 1996 through 2002--but some are cumbersome presentations in PDF.  Missouri Election Results from Missouri Digital News has the official data results since 1995, plus stories associated with that.  A good starting point on this state's election scene is Missourinet's political news coverage.   At bottom of this site are links to other major state political sites.
    The two major urban newspapers had 2000 Election sites: Kansas City Star; and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Elections - worldwide and outside the U.S.:             Top

 The Dutch site Electionworld.org:  Elections around the world is a comprehensive site for worldwide elections, including very recent ones.  See also their Electoral Calendar. For guide, see the sitemap on the sidebar of the page.  The Department of Politics at University of Keele in Great Britain has Elections and Electoral Systems by Country, with a great variety of linked sites.  Election Resources on the Internet by Manuel Álvarez-Rivera also has worldwide linked sites based on a list of nations with highlights for recent election events.

ElectionGuide.Org 2000 from the International Foundation of Election Systems (IFES - ElectionGuide.Org -) has coverage of all national elections, democratic and otherwise, in the year 2000.  An archive dates back to 1998.

Electoral Systems:                         Top

Scholars can use The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems from the ANES and University of Michigan for data.  The web doesn't appear to have much in nice explanations, so stick to traditional print materials for that.  Elections and Electoral Systems by Country from Keele University has generalized links to alternative voting systems, followed by an alphabetically organized list of nations with election results and sometimes, descriptions of electoral systems.  The ACE Project (Administration and Cost of Elections) has an Electoral Systems Index with Overview and in-depth explanation of the basic systems employed among the world's democracies.  Beyond that, its Boundary Delimitation spells out the implications of single-member v. other kinds of districts.

Federal Data sources:  see Fedstats: One Stop Shopping for Federal Statistics.

General Informational Sources:               Top

    Start with Project Vote Smart's Government and Politics by Topic - Project Vote Smart.   Also, New York Times - Political Points by Rich Meislin, has numerous links. The Ultimate Political Science Links Page (P.S. Ruckman Jr. ed.)  has very extensive links.  For U.S. state and local resource sites, see State and Local Government on the Net.  Grace York's University of Michigan Documents Center has excellent material; for U.S. political parties and/or U.S. elections, see Political Science Resources - United States Politics and click to these respective categories.

Help America Vote Act (HAVA, of 2002):                       Top

 

History of Parties:                                Top

    U.S. Political Parties by John F. Bibby is a brief 1996 scholarly document outlining historical development of American parties.  The parent site from the U.S. Department of State is U.S. Political Parties.

International political resources:                            Top

    See Richard Kimber's Political Science Resources for general references; and its Political parties.

    Wilfred Derksen's Electionworld.org includes the latest results from around the world and an Electoral Calendar; also Parties around the world and Parliaments around the world.

Journals:                                              Top

     °American Journal of Political Science;  at Southeast via JSTOR covering 1957-2000, go to Search JSTOR.
     °American Political Science Review;  at Southeast via JSTOR covering 1906-1998, go to Search JSTOR.
     °Electoral Studies: An International Journal on Voting and Electoral Systems and Strategy
     °Journal of Politics; at Southeast via JSTOR, covering 1939-1998, go to Search JSTOR
     °Legislative Studies Quarterly
     °PSonline: A Service of the American Political Science Association
     °Political Research Quarterly
     °Political Science Quarterly Online; at Southeast via JSTOR, covering 1886-1997, go to Search JSTOR
     °Public Opinion Quarterly; at Southeast via JSTOR, covering 1939-1999, go to Search JSTOR

Missouri, State of:                 Top

    See Missouri Secretary of State's World Wide Web Site and move to Elections for comprehensive information on the 2000 Election in Missouri.  This includes Archived Election Information for results of spring and summer 2000 primary elections; but this information is only in PDF format.  For historical election information, also refer to Welcome to the 1999-2000 Official Manual State of Missouri (Broken?) and see Chapter 7 but be warned that its on-line use is highly inconvenient compared to its print form.

Party Organizations in the U.S.:                   Top

Comprehensive list of current American parties with web links is at Grace York's U of Michigan Documents Center,  Political Science Resources - United States Politics - Political Parties.  That site includes many obscure parties.  Below are direct links to the major parties and larger third parties.  The Department of Politics at University of Keele in Great Britain has its customarily thorough political web coverage, at Index to Political Parties in the United States.

    Also try APIC Political Parties from Americana Resources, Inc. and American Political Items Collectors; they include e-mail addresses.

Democrats -
        °Democratic National Committee
        °Democrats Online
        °Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
        °Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
        ° Senate Democratic Policy Committee

Republicans -
        °Republican National Committee
        °National Republican Congressional Committee
        °National Republican Senatorial Committee
        °Senate Republican Policy Committee
        °State Republican parties and candidates
        °Welcome to the RLC Online

Third parties - Ballot Access News index by Richard Winger has extensive detailing on the difficulty of gaining ballot access for small or third parties.  Weekly issues date from May 1994.

    Below are some of the major third parties:
         °Libertarians: Libertarian Party and Libertarian.Org
         °Reform Party: Reform Party
        °The Green Parties of North America
        °Democratic Socialists of America
        °Communist Party U.S.A.; The New Party
        °Constitution Party (formerly the US Taxpayers Party)

State Parties:  See U of Michigan Documents Center - State Party Web Sites or take direct link to National Political Index - State Parties for each state's party system.

Party Conventions and Platforms:   U of Michigan Document Center's Political Science Resources - United States Politics has both under category "Political Parties" followed by clicking on "Conventions" or on "Platforms and Agendas."

Party Voting Index:                   Top

The party voting index has two meanings.  The commonplace use has PVI calculated as the percentage of all votes in a Congress that are party votes (a majority of Democrats voting against a majority of Republicans).  Another use, by Cook Political Reports (cited above), is the deviation of a congressional district from that year's national partisan voting tendency.  File links aren't easy to find on this.

Polls and Polling:                     Top

General Sources of Polls:
        °Survey Research Center - a comprehensive list of sites housed at Princeton University
        °Polling Sources on the Web
        °Links to Other Sources of Polling Information
        °National Council on Public Polls
        °PollingReport.com - Public Opinion Online - excellent daily poll compilation (see below for 2004 election)
        °RealClear Politics - Polls - another large poll compilation (see below for 2004 election)
        °The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
        °Washingtonpost.com Data Directory

Specific polls:
        °The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press
        °The Gallup Organization; go to The Gallup Poll
        °Mason-Dixon - Latest News & Polls
        °American Research Group Inc.
        °Welcome to the Harris Poll Online
        °Eurobarometer - Monitoring the Public Opinion in the European Union
        °European Public Opinion - Homepage
        °Current Population Survey Main Page and CPS Overview from the Census Bureau

How to interpret polls:
        °The Ten Commandments of Polling by Ken Blake, UNC-Chapel Hill
        °Polling by The Why Files
        °Mystery Pollster hosted by Mark Blumenthal; excellent blog
        °A Primer For Handicapping This Race To The Wire by Charlie Cook of The Cook Political Report; Report's home site (The Cook Political Report) includes prognoses of legislative and state gubernatorial contests

Statistical basis of polling: Statistics Every Writer Should Know
        °Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Margin of Error
        °Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Standard Deviation
        °Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Mean
        °Statistics Every Writer Should Know - Median
        °Sample Sizes

Polls on Presidential Election 2004:         Top

    See PollingReport.com - Public Opinion Online with 15 to 20 daily pre-election polls and updates.  Also try RealClear Politics - Polls with a dozen or more battleground states featured.   Election 2004 Polls - Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections is also comprehensive.

    Charlie Cook's A Primer For Handicapping This Race To The Wire advises readers how to handle daily poll information.  His chief advice is to employ mega-poll averaging via sites like the three that are listed above.  I agree, especially in 2004 with serious controversy over handling of estimates on voter turnout by Gallup and some others.

    He and Mystery Pollster Mark Blumenthal (with blog at Mystery Pollster) also advise that one follow Pew Center poll director Andy Kohut's advice to watch the incumbent candidate Bush rather than Kerry, because late undecided voters tend to break strongly for the challenger.  Actually Kohut isn't completely sold on that take, but we'll soon get a reading on this (RDR, 10/22/04).

    Exit polls in 2004 were done for the media by the new National Election Pool, at Election 2004 Exit Polls Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.  (The old Voter News Service bit the dust after dual failures in 2000 and 2002.)  The 2004 NEP results are linked from this site to CNN.com Election 2004, CBSNews.com - Exit Poll Results for State, and MSNBC - Exit poll.  NEP also did 2004 Democratic primary results at National Election Pool Polls - Democratic Primary Exit Polls, 2004.

Primaries and Primary Elections:               Top

    The Year 2000 schedule of primaries is shown below, in the category Year 2000 Political Events Calendar.  Also, Democracy in Action--P2000 from Eric M. Appleman with Democracy in Action, Inc. has an excellent compilation of past events and overview of the 2000 primary season.  Its Clickable Map of the United States has information on each state's primary procedures, lists of candidates, and major newspapers.  All are well linked.  Rules for presidential campaign finance are briefly explicated at its Presidential Campaign Finance--Main Page.  For serious followers and junkies alike, every conceivable candidate who might make the news has linked sites on the principal page (see also immediately below).  Comprehensive archival coverage of the delegate allocations, including those from primary states, is at The Green Papers Election 2000 Presidential Primary Season.

Frontloading of primaries:  This has been underway for years, but 2000 set a new standard.  See The Rest of the Primaries for the section shown below the calendar entitled Frontloading and Compression: Primaries Will Go Off "Like a String of Firecrackers" demonstrating that early March (March 7 and 14) is intensively front-loaded this time by both parties, even though the Republicans now confer extra delegates to states willing to move to the rear of the calendar.   Over half the delegates in each party will be selected by March 7 alone!  For another interpretation of crowding of the presidential primaries into early weeks in 2000, see Washingtonpost.com - Primaries Could Be Decisive by Mid-March by Terry Neal.  This brief article demonstrates increased crowding due to California's move from its traditional June date to March 7, 2000.  Because California is also a "jungle primary," the effect may be to force moderation of candidate positions in lieu of the ideological left or right of traditional party primaries.  (Thanks to Jeremy McCrary in my PS360 class for this link and description.)

Regional Primary Elections Plan:  Sooner or later something like this appears inevitable. See the National Association of Secretaries of State's  NASS Home Page and its Regional Presidential Primary Plan.  This is a rotating regional primary plan based on four natural state groupings (Eastern, Southern, Midwestern, and Western) with each taking turn going first.  The Regional Primaries site is a link at bottom of The Rest of the Primaries, to show how the NASS legislation reads.

Blanket Primaries:  California, Washington, Alaska, and Louisiana (to an extent) all have the type of open primary known as a blanket or "jungle primary" where all registered voters in the state take a single ballot and can vote for any one candidate for each listed office.  This differs from the traditional Wisconsin-styled open primary where voters take any party ballot they wish without declaring affiliation with that party, but can then vote only for that party's candidates.

    On June 26, 2000 the Supreme Court in California Democratic Party v. Jones (99-401) threw out the California blanket primary, which had been in effect during 1998.   See California Democratic Party v. Jones for the case syllabus.  Justice Scalia's majority decision is at CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY v. JONES.  The right of association of state parties has been repeatedly upheld in recent years by the Court despite state prerogatives to regulate parties through laws creating partisan primary elections.  For original development and implementation of the California plan before 1998, see CA Secretary of State - News Releases from Bill Jones under the heading June 2, 1998 Open Primary Election. (BROKEN LINK)

2000 Results:  Complete results are shown on The Green Papers Election 2000 Presidential Primary Season.  Click on each state also to see how its delegate allocation has been determined.

Reference Sources:                                          Top

Penn Library-Van Pelt Guides to U.S. Political Parties and Elections has primary source materials likely to occur in any academic library.

Redistricting:

    Texas 2003-04 redistricting:  Redistricting Services from the Texas Legislative Council is the official site for the Tom DeLay-led redistricting between the 2002 Republican takeover of the 78th Legislature and the subsequent redrawn U.S. House map of 2004.  Enactment was on 12 October 2003.  Redistricting Services - U.S. Congressional Districts in Effect for 2004 Elections shows the result with interactive and print-form Acrobat maps.

    The intention and effect was to pack Democratic votes into black and Hispanic regions to deprive white Democrats of sufficient base vote to survive challenges by primary challengers (in minority districts) or by Republicans in districts made more conservative by redrawing.  A federal three-judge panel from the Eastern District of Texas district court declined to overturn the DeLay product (Judges uphold new map, Austin American-Statesman, January 7, 2004) in Session, et al. v Rick Perry, et al. (sessvperry010604opn in pdf).  Plaintiffs alleged violation of the Voting Rights Act due to dilutions of minority vote, but defendants successfully claimed partisan rather than racial intent.  The U.S. Supreme Court on 16 January 2004 declined to hear an emergency appeal from the Texas Democrats, thus permitting the redrawn districts to apply to the 2004 election.  Any eventual hearing of the case is delayed to 2005 or later.

    Special Report Driving the Districts from the Austin American-Statesman is a six-part series with background on the year-long controversy culminating in the redrawn map.  A chronicle of events is Public Interest Guide to Redistricting from The Center for Voting and Democracy - CVD.

"Responsible Parties" report:  The APSA's 50th Anniversary of the much-reviewed 1950 "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System" is at  Political Organizations and Parties (intro) and APSA Report and Commentaries for full details and papers.

Thomas Nast:  The wood block illustrator genius of Harper's Weekly was a president-maker and breaker in the period during and after the Civil War.  He is most famous for the campaign to bring down Tammany Hall's Boss Tweed and the Tweed Ring.  From a party history standpoint, his fame rests on creation of the elephant and donkey for the two major parties.
    The Thomas Nast Society publishes a journal about the illustrator.  Recommended is "Thomas Nast-Cartoons and Illustrations" [C] Copyright Dover Publications, INC. New York 1974; by Thomas Nast St. Hill.

    A site with extensive links and a subsection with German language text is Thomas Nast edited by Charles J. James, Madison, Wisconsin.  This page includes extensive material on German-American culture, to which Nast made fundamental contributions while also displaying certain obvious prejudices of his own, aimed especially at Catholicism and Irish immigrants.

    The same Nast was a famous champion against prejudices toward American blacks and Chinese (either citizens or otherwise).  See Cartoons of Thomas Nast: Reconstruction, Chinese Immigration, Native Americans, Gilded Era; these are among the finest illustrations on the web, with sufficiently large size to truly see the small detail for which Nast is renowned.

    Finally, a handful of illustrations are part of the U.S. Senate's "Learning About the Senate" art history section; click to U.S. Senate Art & History Home Exhibits - Political Cartoons of Thomas Nast.

Voters:              Top

Voter Registration:  Project Vote Smart is on top of this one.  See Info for Your State - Project Vote Smart.

    The Federal Election Commission's About Elections and Voting page has downloadable voter registration forms at http://www.fec.gov/votregis/nvr aintr.htm.  The page http://www.fec.gov/votregis/vr.htm shows the 22 states that accept this form.  Missouri is not included, but it links to a state page that provides a separate mail registration form; all you need is Adobe Acrobat and a printer.  To see if you're eligible to register, check FEC's State Voter Registration Requirements.  Or go to Project Vote Smart's Missouri page, at Missouri Voter Registration Information - Project Vote Smart.

Absentee Voting:  For the State of Missouri, see Missouri Secretary of State's World Wide Web Site and scroll down to ""Request for Missouri Absentee Ballot" Form (PDF)."  For Cape Girardeau area, see Election Information from the Cape Girardeau County Clerk's Office.

Motor Voter law and impact:  See NVRA Web Intro, entitled "Statistical Highlights of the Federal Election Commission Report to the Congress on the Impact of the National Voter Registration Act 1995-1996."

American National Election Studies on Voters:  NES has voter demographics since 1952.  Start at National Election Studies Homepage or move directly to The NES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior.

        °Candidate Evaluations:  See NES Table 7, Evaluation of the Presidential Candidates dating quadrennially from 1952; and Table 8, Evaluation of Congressional Candidates dating biennially since 1978.
        °Voter Choice:  See NES Table 9,  Voter Choice, for division of the NES sample on presidential and congressional elections since 1952.  Included is a profile of split-ticket voting.
        °Trust in Government:  See NES Table 5,  Support for the Political System on trust, efficacy, government responsiveness, and sense of civic duty.  Some measures started in 1952, some more recently.

Voting in Cape Girardeau:  Refer to Election Information from the Cape Girardeau County Clerk's Office.

Young Voters:  Kaiser Family Foundation: Young Adults Have Strong Opinions on Top Campaign Issues But Many Still Not Planning to Vote has survey information confirming this.

Voter Technology Project (CalTech and MIT):
    Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project sponsors systematic analysis of the major problems that afflicted the American 2000 election vote counts.  See especially the October 2004 report on the State of Georgia's use of Diebold voting machines in 2002 on "The Reliability of Electronic Voting Machines in Georgia" by Charles S. Stewart III, at georgiastewart.

Voter Turnout:                    
    The most recent piece, published in March 2003 from Carnegie Corp. by Allison Bryne Fields entitled "Participating in Democracy" is in PDF form at youthchallenge.
    The Electorate:  Voters and Non-Voters from Democracy in Action is an excellent summation of the recent American record of meager turnouts.  Links to interested groups and to other studies of the electorate are plentiful, but some are outdated or gone.

    The Federal Election Commission's About Elections and Voting has national turnout figures for presidential and congressional elections since 1960, and state-by-state returns since 1972.  Included are Voter Registration and Turnout 2000 and Voter Registration and Turnout - 1998.  See also National Voter Turnout in Federal Elections: 1960-1996; and Voter Registration and Turnout - 1996.  For searches, refer here, entitled "Choose a State for Presidential Voter Registration and Participation Statistics."  For cautionary explanation about how Voting Age Population (VAP) and turnout are calculated, see A Few Words About Voting Age Population (VAP).

     For reported voter turnout, see American National Election Studies, Table 6, Political Involvement and Participation in Politics - Index to the NES Guide and go to Voter Turnout.  Notice the radically different figures from reported turnout in ANES compared to actual voter turnout from election tallies.  Reported turnout is also shown at the U.S. Census Bureau,  Voting and Registration Data, through the 2000 election as part of its Current Population Survey.

    A nice critical review of recent low turnout is Martin Wattenberg's Should Election Day Be a Holiday in the October 1998 issue of The Atlantic.  His work should be linked for source material to Voting and Registration Data from the Bureau of the Census/Current Population Survey, for information from 1966 through 2000 on voter turnout.  Scroll down to the Historical Time Series Tables for biennial results underscoring the Wattenberg demonstration of generally lowered turnout over this period, with the greatest declines of turnout occurring in the lower education parts of the population.

    The Vanishing Voter: A study of public involvement in the 2000 presidential campaign from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government uses a Voter Involvement Index for weekly updates showing the disengagement of most Americans from elementary aspects of the political system, including the 2000 primaries.  Very useful data, presented in either graphic or tabular form.  The data is derived from a recent series of surveys dating since November 1999, per The Vanishing Voter Archive of Past Results.

    Committee for the Study of the American Electorate has website news reports on voter turnout in 1998, including CSAE's final post-election report 2/9/1999.  See also Voter Contact Services - National Political DataBase (this is new to me; check it carefully!).

    Data on turnout in recent national elections outside the U.S. is at FEC's International Voter Participation Figures, derived partly from International Foundation for Election Systems.

Year 2000 Political Events Calendar:  The Federal Elections Commission has both presidential and congressional primaries listed by month and date, at 2000 Presidential and Congressional Primary Dates by State.   The GWU Democracy in Action site (discussed above in "Primaries and Primary Elections") has The Rest of the Primaries calendar with links to each state, presented in chronological sequence.  See also Political Events Calendar sponsored by Political Resources Home Page (look for "Calendar" on this framed site).  Included there via links are 2 000 Congressional Election Dates - supplied by Roll Call and 2 000 Presidential Primary Dates.  See also President 2000 Election Calendar and Primary Coverage - U.S. Government InfoResources.

    Chronicle of candidate debates is at Archive of candidate books and debates maintained by Issues2000 -  Presidential Candidates on the Issues.

    For comparison to past primary seasons 1992 and 1996, a good calendar from CNN/Time's AllPolitics site is AllPolitics - Primary & Caucus Dates.  This includes delegate allocation, so one can easily see from delegate counts why the major party presidential nominations were decided before the end of March.

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