Using Twitter to Detect Polling Place Issues on U.S. Election Days

37 Pages Posted: 24 Jan 2023

See all articles by Prathm Juneja

Prathm Juneja

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute

Luciano Floridi

Yale University - Digital Ethics Center; University of Bologna- Department of Legal Studies

Date Written: December 14, 2022

Abstract

In this article we analyze whether Twitter can be used to detect barriers to voting at polling places. We use 20,322 tweets geolocated to U.S. states that match a series of keywords on the 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 general election days. We fine-tune BERTweet, a pre-trained language model, using a training set of 6,365 tweets labeled as issues or non-issues. We develop a model with an accuracy of 96.9% and a recall of 72.2%, and another model with an accuracy of 90.5% and a recall of 93.5%, far exceeding the performance of baseline models. Based on these results, we argue that these BERTweet-based models are promising methods for detecting polling place issues on U.S. election days. We suggest that outputs from these models can be used to supplement existing voter protection efforts and to research the impact of policies, demographics, and other variables on voting access.

Keywords: natural language processing, election administration, voting, voter suppression, machine learning, twitter

Suggested Citation

Juneja, Prathm and Floridi, Luciano, Using Twitter to Detect Polling Place Issues on U.S. Election Days (December 14, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4334243 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4334243

Prathm Juneja (Contact Author)

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute ( email )

1 St. Giles
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 3PG Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

Luciano Floridi

Yale University - Digital Ethics Center ( email )

85 Trumbull Street
New Haven, CT CT 06511
United States
2034326473 (Phone)

University of Bologna- Department of Legal Studies ( email )

Via Zamboni 22
Bologna, Bo 40100
Italy

HOME PAGE: http://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/luciano.floridi/en

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