“It’s Not the Voting that’s Democracy, It’s the Counting” 1 Public Attitudes towards the Electoral Process in the Wake of HAVA Chad Murphy Martin Johnson Shaun Bowler Department of Political Science University of California, Riverside Riverside, CA 92521 Abstract The Help America Vote Act is aimed at improving electoral practices and educating voters about changes in voting technology and procedures. A major consequence of this legislation has been the replacement of punch card and mechanical lever voting machines with computer-based voting in more than one-third of U.S. counties since 2004 (Brace, 2006). We ask how voters react to these changes, focusing on preferences over types of voting technology and confidence in U.S. elections among voters in California. We are particularly interested in how the effort of local election officials affects these judgments in the face of change. Our findings suggest that spending aimed at educating voters is associated with confidence in U.S. elections but has little relationship with enthusiasm for technology used locally. Partisanship is strongly associated with both judgments about the electoral system and voting technology. KEYWORDS: voter confidence, HAVA, voting technology, election administration, contextual analysis 1 Stoppard (1972). A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Las Vegas, NV. The authors thank Todd Donovan, Bonnie Glaser, Martha Kropf, Karin MacDonald, John McNulty, and Max Neiman for their comments and discussions. We also thank California Deputy Secretary of State Chris Reynolds for his helpful discussions and in providing crucial help on data availability. All errors are our own. Corresponding author Martin Johnson martin.Johnson@ucr.edu