Expert Report for Reyes, et al. v. Chilton, et al.

Following an internal audit from the Washington State Auditor's Office, the UCLA VRP sued three counties in Eastern Washington for discriminatory signature verification requirements, arguing that over 4,500 Latino voters had their ballots wrongfully rejected due to biases inherent in the signature review process. My role in this lawsuit was to design a survey experiment that proved this claim. Results from the survey experiment indicated that all else equal, Latino signatures are 4.6-7.2% more likely to be incorrectly rejected by average American voters. Since filing, two counties have reach settlement agreements and one is going to trial.

• Immediately  after the 2020 election, there were dozens of media reports proclaiming huge Latino inroads made by Trump.  I was hired by Florida Democrats to join a team of fact finders to find out what really happened. Using GIS software, I merged election results from 2016 and 2020 to a precinct shapefile of Miami-Dade. Then, I categorized each precinct into one of three categories: mild Trump gains, moderate Trump gains, and severe Trump gains. This graphic and others like it were included in the main report and related media commentary. With it, a more nuanced portrait of Latino vote choice emerged. Trump made significant inroads amongst Cuban voters, (see Little Havana and Hialeah) but other Latino voters (e.g. Puerto Ricans) buoyed Biden in Central Florida. 

• Santa Clara county is unique in that Asian Americans are the plurality racial group and another quarter of the population is Latino. With multiple racial voting blocs in the area, it is crucial that the maps for political office in Santa Clara are compliant with voting rights laws. In anticipation of decennial redistricting, I was hired by voting rights advocates to help measure the degree of racially polarized voting in Santa Clara using the ecological inference software eiCompare. As can be seen on the left, Latino voters, Asian voters, and white voters all had distinct candidates of choice for Supervisor in 2020. Recent lawsuits in Santa Clara have made apparent  that even in California, minority voters are still getting blocked out of the political process.

• LPPI is a leading authority on Los Angeles politics and on election nights I oversee a team of graduate and undergraduate policy fellows in producing dozens of figures like the one seen here. Scatterplots like this one are meant to be easily digestible and are circulated around social media and news outlets to illustrate how a racial group (in this case Latinos) voted in a given election. Karen Bass ultimately became mayor, but as my figure shows, she might have been the least popular candidate among Latinos in the primary.