The Scout Report -- Volume 22, Number 42

The Library of Congress describes the 1800 presidential campaign between incumbent Federalist John Adams and Republican Thomas Jefferson as "extremely partisan and outright nasty." This website provides visitors with a number of primary documents related to this election, the candidates, the development of the electoral college, and more. These fascinating documents include a letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in which the former describes a plan to manipulate presidential electors. Visitors can also look at a letter from Alexander Hamilton in which he urges his fellow Federalists to rally behind Adams - a candidate that Hamilton describes in an open letter as having a character unbefitting a president - because he was "the only thing that can possibly save us from the fangs of Jefferson." The collection also includes materials regarding a central issue of the 1800 election: the relocation of the nation's capital to Washington, D.C. As a whole, Creating the United States: Election of 1880 provides insight into the the tempestuous and fragile nature of the nation's early political life. [MMB]

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The National Women's History Museum (NWHM) has created this impressive collection of primary source documents, lesson plans, and educational resources related to the long campaign to grant U.S. women full suffrage rights. Visitors can quickly and easily browse this collection by Primary Source Sets (organized into topics including The Early Republic, Abolitionist Movements, Women Suffrage in the West, and Imagery and Propaganda) or by Educational Resources (which includes videos that can be shown in the classroom and lesson plans). Alternatively, one can explore this collection through the History tab, which features a series of short essays and an Interactive Timeline to provide additional context. Primary Sources included in this collections include a number of speeches, powerful photographs, copies of the newspaper Woman's Journal and Suffrage News, cartoons, and more. [MMB]

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The 1965 Voting Rights Act is an essential part of U.S. voting history and a milestone for the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Teaching Tolerance has compiled this collection of classroom activities and resources to help middle school and high school students better understand the circumstances behind the the passage of the Voting Rights Act and its significance. These resources include video footage of Lyndon Johnson signing the Act into law (part of NBC's archival footage collection); a succinct summary of the key points of the Voting Rights Act; and powerful graphs that show the Number of Black Legislators in the South(1868-1900 and 19060-1992) and the Percentage of Registered Voters in Black Voting-Age Population. This website also features resources related to contemporary debates surrounding the voting rights in the 1965 law, including information and materials relating to the 2009 and 2013 Supreme Court Challenges to the Voting Rights Act. [MMB]

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From KQED News comes this extensive interactive timeline, spanning 1787 to 2016, that highlights major events and laws impacting suffrage. For instance, in the first presidential election of 1789, as this timeline highlights, only 6% of the U.S. population was able to vote. Most events on the suffrage timeline highlight the passage of the 15th and 19th Amendments along with the Voting Rights Act, emphasizing woman's suffrage and the long movement for African-American voting rights. In contrast, this timeline includes important details about suffrages rights for other groups, providing a more thorough overview of U.S. Voting Rights. For example, included here is the legal exclusion of voting rights to Native Americans and Chinese Americans in 1876 and 1882, respectively. The timeline also highlights the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which provided citizenship and voting rights to first-generation Japanese- Americans. The comprehensive nature of this timeline makes it a useful K-12 classroom tool to start discussion or inspire individual research projects. The timeline is also accompanied by a lesson plan. [MMB]

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The Electoral College is a central - and controversial - part of the election process in the United States. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has created this informative and engaging website to help students and members of the general public better understand the history and modern day operation of the Electoral College. Here, visitors can explore Frequently Asked Questions about this uniquely American component of presidential elections, view a helpful video that provides an overview of the college, and check out historical Electoral College results. Election results dating back to 1964 are mapped on this website, and visitors can view these results on a timeline in order to explore how state party leanings have shifted over the past half century. Perhaps the highlight of this website is the Make a Prediction section, which provides users an interactive map that allows visitors to predict the result of the 2016 election by projecting the victor of each state and the resulting tally of electoral votes. This feature is especially helpful for teaching the workings of the Electoral College - and its significance in U.S. presidential campaigning - to students. [MMB]

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The Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History has created eight lesson plans for teaching civics and government to K-12 students. These lessons are designed to help students at three different grade levels (4th-6th, 7th-9th, and 10th-12th) better understand and evaluate the United States Electoral College. In each of these three lessons, students examine passages in Article II and the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution that relate to the Electoral College, and consider contemporary arguments for and against the Electoral College. Another highlight of this collection is Presidential Election Results 1789-2008, which highlights the candidates, parties, Electoral College, and popular vote tallies for all presidential elections throughout U.S. History. Other lessons included in this collection address checks and balances in the U.S. government and the Citizenship Test. K-12 instructors can access these lesson plans and related materials by creating a free account. [MMB]

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Statistician Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, a website named after the total number of electors in the Electoral College. Silver and FiveThirtyEight rose to fame during the 2008 primary election, when Silver, then publishing under a pseudonym, garnered praise for his predictions about the Democratic Primary race. Since then, Silver has revealed his identity and continued to publish his predictions for political races across the United States. Silver does not rely on polling information alone; rather, he incorporates multiple polls and weighs polling data with demographic information that indicates who is likely to vote. On FiveThirtyEight: 2016 Election Forecast, visitors can check out Silver's latest predictions for electoral votes on a state-by-state basis. By clicking on a particular state, visitors can see more detailed information about Silver's sources and analysis for that state. Visitors can also explore Silver's predictions for Senate campaigns and read analysis from Silver or some of his colleagues. Those interested in learning more about Silver's methodology can do so through a link on the bottom of this website. [MMB]

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Until recently, pollsters telephoned residential phone numbers in order to predict the outcomes of presidential elections. Today, many people use mobile phones instead of landlines; in fact, the number of households with landlines has dropped from 8 in 10 in 2008 to just 5 in 10 in 2015. In addition, cell phone owners are substantially less likely to pick up their phones when they see an unknown number. With this in mind, how can the public be accurately polled for the 2016 election? Are individuals who pick up their phones - whether landline or cell phone - really representative of voters as a whole? This recent article in Nature explores these questions. The author also highlights possible new polling techniques, including the incorporation of "big data" to create more accurate poll predictions. The article includes an accompanying podcast episode that highlights polling information from the United States and Great Britain. Research citations are provided for those interested in further reading. [MMB]

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In 1952, Democratic Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson was infamously photographed wearing shoes with a hole worn through the sole. Soon after, Stevenson supporters ran a televised commercial featuring a woman, clad in evening wear and pearls, singing, "I'd rather have a man with a hole in his shoes than a hole in everything he says!" The 1952 presidential election was the first to feature such televised campaign advertisements. Since then, the nature of these advertisements has changed greatly, but they continue to play an important role in U.S. presidential campaigns. On The Living Room Candidate, a website created by the Museum of the Moving Image, visitors can explore a number of these advertisements by election year. Visitors can also search this extensive collection (over 300 videos total) by Type of Commercial - a list that includes "backfire," "children," and "fear." While checking out these video clips, visitors can also get quick synopses of past candidates and view final Electoral College results. Educators can find accompanying lesson plans in the For Teachers section. [MMB]

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Campaign Buttons Etc. features campaign buttons dating back to 1896, when the William McKinley campaign featured an "honest dollar" pendant in support of McKinley's campaign against silver populist William Jennings Bryan. (Bryan, in turn, is pictured against a silver background in the three campaign buttons featured on this site). On this website, visitors can browse for campaign buttons for presidential candidates along with some of their primary contenders (the latter can be found in the Hopefuls section; although some more prominent primary contenders have their pages). Each button is accompanied by a short description. Buttons are for sale for those who love to collect such items, but are simply enjoyable to browse. This site also features buttons from some local candidates throughout history. [MMB]

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Today, debates about the best method to vote hinge on the advantages and risks of adopting an electronic voting system. Similar issues about voting machinery have persisted throughout voting history. For instance, in the nineteenth century reformers campaigned for the gear and lever voting machine to provide a uniform method of voting. By the 1920s, many cities and states decided to purchase these now-iconic machines as a way to accommodate a growing electorate and increasingly lengthy ballots. This website from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History exhibits a variety of material related to the gear and lever machine. Included here are a 1913 photograph of Chicago women voting in a city election via the gear and lever machine; a 1940 sample ballot by the Republican Party which utilizes pictures of levers next to Republican candidates; and a 1960s handbill urging voters to "pull the first lever for Jack Kennedy and his team." [MMB]

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Wisconsin Public Broadcasting Media Lab, using PBS Learning Media, provides this collection of 20 years of images related to US presidential elections. The site is optimized for teachers: captions list the permitted uses for each image, and grade levels are suggested. There's also a persistent link to browse by standards in order to find materials appropriate for different grade levels and standards such as Common Core (although this search goes beyond the Presidential Elections Collection, across the broader PBS Learning Media materials). For example, an image of Maya Angelou reading a poem at President Bill Clinton's inauguration can be streamed, downloaded, shared, modified, and is tagged as appropriate for grades 5 through 12. If a teacher creates a free account, it's possible to both create and save compilations of resources. [DS]

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In 2012, 53.6% of all Americans eligible to vote participated in the Presidential election, significantly fewer than the 87.2% of Belgians who participated in Belgium's most recent national election. What accounts for low voter turnout in the United States? This 2016 Pew Research Fact Tank feature compares voting and registration data from the thirty-five nations that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In the accompanying write up, author Drew Desilver considers a variety of factors that impact voter turnout, including compulsory voting laws and registration processes. Notably, the United States has a significantly lower voter registration rate (approximately 71% of eligible citizens are registered to vote in the United States, compared to 91% of their Canadian and British counterparts and 99% of all citizens in Japan), which, in turn, plays a key role in low U.S. voter turnout. Why is voter registration so comparatively low in the United States? One possible factor is that voter registration is a strictly individual responsibility in the United States, while the government plays a more active role in registering voters in other countries. [MMB]

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The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) has compiled this database of both quantitative and qualitative information related to voting in countries around the world. Users can search this database by country to get available information about a number of factors, including voter turnout, political finance, gender representation in office, and the design of the electoral system. Alternatively, users can also explore an individual field in order to make cross-country comparisons within a particular region or around the world. Some of this information is also charted; by searching for "election type," visitors can quickly see how many countries have a presidential system via a bar graph. This database provides a useful way for students and researchers alike to quickly gather and compare data. Visitors looking for more analysis may want to check out the Publications and Analysis section of this website. [MMB]

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Some concerned about low voter turnout in the United States propose compulsory voting as one possible solution. This debate has also emerged in the United Kingdom. In 2006, the UK-based Electoral Commission published this forty-two-page report that examines the practice of compulsory voting in countries that have adopted such laws. Countries considered in this report include Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Italy, among many others. The authors examine why compulsory voting was introduced in each country, how it is enforced, and its overall impact. The report also outlines the debate about compulsory voting in the United Kingdom. This report is a useful resource for anyone seeking to better understand compulsory voting in both theory and practice. Its comprehensive nature also makes it a useful starting point for those seeking to better understand compulsory voting in a particular nation. [MMB]

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