Research
Independent research.
Original analyses, papers, and structured investigations of public data: electoral, civic, infrastructure. Each paper has its own native landing page with abstract, key findings, and a downloadable PDF.
Paper
June 2026Does Unemployment Increase Protest Participation? Evidence from the 2020 George Floyd BLM Protests During COVID-19
An Elicit systematic review on pandemic unemployment as a protest mobilizer.
Elicit Systematic Review
Sudden pandemic unemployment increased BLM protest participation through economic shock effects that heightened racial grievances, amplified by biographical availability from lockdowns; health insurance decoupling received minimal empirical testing.
Paper
June 2026How Do Historical Narratives About White Supremacy as a Tool of Class Control Influence Working-Class Political Attitudes and Support for Redistributive Policies?
An Elicit systematic review on ideology, class identity, and redistribution.
Elicit Systematic Review
Historical narratives about white supremacy as a tool of class control channel white working-class economic grievances into racial resentment rather than support for redistribution, moderated by class identity type, union membership, and economic self-interest among lower-income whites.
Paper
June 2026What Heuristic Methods Can Effectively Detect Fragmented Networks in IRS and FEC Data?
An Elicit systematic review of entity-resolution and graph-clustering methods for campaign-finance and nonprofit-filing data.
Elicit Systematic Review
Hierarchical fuzzy spectral clustering, modularity-based graph partitioning, Bayesian network inference, graph pattern matching, and federated graph neural networks can all effectively detect fragmented networks in IRS and FEC data. Spectral and modularity methods are best suited for campaign finance community recovery; graph pattern matching is most efficient for structured tax fraud detection; federated and ensemble architectures offer the strongest scalability for large-scale financial networks. Systematic review: 494 papers screened via Elicit (Semantic Scholar + OpenAlex), 25 included for extraction.
Paper
May 2026The Submerged Electorate
Winner-Take-All Allocation and the Structural Dilution of Minority Votes in “Safe” States (Mississippi and California, 2020–2024)
Cody Hall
A companion to “Safe States, Silent Voters” (Hall, 2026), which showed that partisan safety suppresses aggregate turnout, this paper asks who bears the cost. We argue that the winner- take-all (WTA) allocation of electoral votes does not merely depress participation; it structurally dilutes the political leverage of voters whose preferences diverge from their state’s statewide majority, a population concentrated among racial and ethnic minorities in non-competitive states. Using certified Federal Election Commission and state results for 2020 and 2024, validated-voter vote splits (Pew Research Center, 2025; Catalist, 2025), and a formal model of the marginal electoral utility of a ballot, we examine two contrasting “safe” states: Mississippi, the state with the highest Black population share in the country, and California, the largest and most diverse Democratic stronghold. In Mississippi, we estimate that roughly 366,000 Black Democratic votes in 2020 translated into zero of the state’s six electoral votes. In California, the same mechanism erases on the order of three million minority Republican ballots and renders more than 1.5 million Democratic votes mathematically surplus. The pattern is symmetric across the partisan divide, which indicates that vote dilution is a structural feature of the allocation rule rather than a partisan artifact. We further show that WTA shields dominant state parties from the national electoral consequences of localized turnout suppression, and we evaluate the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), now enacted in 19 jurisdictions holding 222 electoral votes (National Popular Vote, 2026; NPR, 2026), as a remedy that would make every minority ballot a uniform fraction of the decisive national total.
Paper
May 2026Safe States, Silent Voters: A Six-Cycle Analysis of Partisan Predictability and Voter Turnout in U.S. Presidential Elections (2004–2024)
Revised May 2026 · An OLS analysis across six presidential cycles, an evaluation of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and the case that ~89 million non-votes in 2024 reflect structural disenfranchisement, not apathy.
Cody L. Hall
This study examines whether state-level electoral predictability, commonly described as a state being “safely” Democratic or Republican, is associated with lower voter participation. Using certified Federal Election Commission (FEC) vote totals and Voting-Eligible Population (VEP) turnout estimates from the United States Elections Project, we estimate Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions of VEP turnout on absolute partisan lean for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia across six consecutive presidential elections (2004 to 2024). In every cycle the relationship is negative, statistically significant (p < 0.001), and explains between 41% and 55% of the cross-sectional variance in state-level turnout (R² = 0.410 to 0.553). The regression slope is strikingly stable across cycles, averaging approximately −0.41 percentage points of turnout per unit of absolute partisan lean. These findings are consistent with a large body of peer-reviewed research showing that electoral closeness and campaign attention raise participation (Blais, 2006; Geys, 2006; Cox and Munger, 1989; Gimpel et al., 2007; Enos and Fowler, 2018). We situate the result within rational-choice theories of abstention, demonstrate its structural persistence across candidates and national environments, and argue that the pattern constitutes empirical evidence of a participation cost imposed by the winner-take-all geography of the Electoral College. We close by evaluating the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) as a proposed remedy, presenting both the case advanced by its proponents and the principal scholarly objections.