Election 2020: 89 articles to teach you about how American elections really work
Editors’ note: In a world transformed by a pandemic, few of the fundamentals in Americans’ lives – schools, jobs, even how to shop for groceries – have remained the same. The same is true with the election, where the most basic of the institution’s elements – how, where and when to vote, among them – have changed.
When The Conversation US’s politics editors met to figure out how to provide readers with coverage that would be useful and informative, the approach was clear: a civics lesson. Over the course of roughly 100 articles, our scholars have explained how the U.S. election system works, retold the history of how it got that way and examined what effects and significance those mechanisms have for the nation today.
Here, our team has collected all of these articles, divided thematically, from the very beginning of campaigning through what happens after Election Day itself.
Campaigning
Basic elements of political campaigning
The clothes make the candidate: The sartorial politics of this year’s key Senate races
Angry Americans: How political rage helps campaigns but hurts democracy
Campaigning in a pandemic
Campaign tactics
Why you’re getting so many political text messages right now
Trump and Biden ads on Facebook and Instagram focus on rallying the base
Political conventions
Democratic, Republican parties both play favorites when allotting convention delegates to states
Political conventions today are for partying and pageantry, not picking nominees
Pandemic alters political conventions – which have always changed with the times
Money in politics
Money talks: Big business, political strategy and corporate involvement in US state politics
When presidential campaigns end, what happens to the leftover money?
Candidates’ debates
Think presidential debates are dull? Thank 1950s TV game shows
How to make presidential debates serve voters, not candidates
Lessons on wrangling candidates from the masterful moderator of presidential debates, Jim Lehrer
Don’t underestimate the power of the putdown in a presidential debate
VP debates are often forgettable – but Dan Quayle never recovered from his 1988 debate mistake
Media and public perception
Political bias in media doesn’t threaten democracy – other, less visible biases do
Watch more TV to understand the backlash against the women in the running for vice president
The candidate you like is the one you think is most electable
Polling
Epic miscalls and landslides unforeseen: The exceptional catalog of polling failure
Political forecast models aren’t necessarily more accurate than polls – or the weather
Vice presidential and Cabinet picks
For Biden, naming Cabinet before election would be a big risk
Don’t expect Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris for VP to make or break the 2020 election
VP pick Kamala Harris stands on many women’s shoulders, especially Bella Abzug’s
International perspectives
Russian media may be joining China and Iran in turning on Trump
What US election officials could learn from Australia about boosting voter turnout
The process of voting
History of voting
There’s nothing unusual about early voting – it’s been done since the founding of the republic
A summer of protest, unemployment and presidential politics – welcome to 1932
Voter suppression
Closing polling places is the 21st century’s version of a poll tax
Why the Supreme Court made Wisconsin vote during the coronavirus crisis
Trump’s encouragement of GOP poll watchers echoes an old tactic of voter intimidation
Georgia’s election disaster shows how bad voting in 2020 can be
Many voters face obstacles
Citizenship delays imperil voting for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the 2020 election
As few as 1 in 10 homeless people vote in elections – here’s why
Specific voting groups and blocs
With Kamala Harris, Americans yet again have trouble understanding what multiracial means
Kamala Harris represents an opportunity for coalition building between Blacks and Asian Americans
Asian Americans’ political preferences have flipped from red to blue
Want the youth vote? Some college students are still up for grabs in November
Will German Americans again put Donald Trump over the top in the presidential election?
Indian Americans can be an influential voting bloc – despite their small numbers
With Harris pick, Biden reaches out to young Black Americans
How to vote
Voting in person
Voting while God is watching – does having churches as polling stations sway the ballot?
Poll workers on Election Day will be younger – and probably more diverse – due to COVID-19
Voting by mail
Timing, signatures and huge demand make mail-in voting difficult
Research on voting by mail says it’s safe – from fraud and disease
Mail-in voting lessons from Oregon, the state with the longest history of voting by mail
Mail-in voting does not cause fraud, but judges are buying the GOP’s argument that it does
Aftermath
Electoral College
Election integrity
Potential for violence
When politicians use hate speech, political violence increases
Election violence in November? Here’s what the research says
Who decides the outcome?
The case of Biden versus Trump – or how a judge could decide the presidential election
Who formally declares the winner of the US presidential election?
How it all ends
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
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