Through the polling booth curtain: A visual experiment on citizens’ behaviour inside the polling booth

Abstract

While many biological and psychological experiments rely on a visual observation of subjects’ behaviour under given experimental circumstances, nobody has yet filmed what happens inside a polling booth. Teaming up with professional film-makers, we conducted an experiment whereby we film the shadow of 145 voters while they are inside the polling booth casting their vote. We observe their emotions but also measure how long they think before casting their vote using three different electoral ballots/voting machines showing that the average thinking time varies from 20s to a full minute with the exact same candidates and instructions depending on the procedure used. We believe that our experiment opens new way to directly measure electoral behaviour without relying on respondents’ self-reporting while avoiding the use of intrusive equipment that ‘feels’ artificial to subjects and respecting every key ethical condition of experimental research including anonymity and informed consent.