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Credit: De Gruyter
Michael P. McDonald's new book From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 US Presidential Election has recently been published by De Gruyter. McDonald, Professor of Political Science at University of Florida, is a leading expert on American elections (bio here:https://polisci.ufl.edu/michael-mcdonald/)
His website, where he disseminates election statistics, (www.electproject.org) received 1.3 million unique visitors in the 2020 calendar year. He was cited in at least 232 local, national, and international newspaper articles in 2020 and provided commentary on numerous television and radio shows, including CNN, MSNBC, FOX, PBS, BBC, and NPR, among others.
In From Pandemic to Insurrection McDonald describes voting in the 2020 election, from the presidential nomination to new voting laws post-election. Election officials and voters navigated the challenging pandemic to hold the highest turnout election since 1900. President Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the pandemic’s severity coupled with frequent vote fraud accusations affected how states provided safe voting, how voters cast ballots, how lawyers fought legal battles, and ultimately led to an unsuccessful insurrection.
McDonald also provides an in-depth look at the history of voting in the US, how mail-in balloting really works, how the electorate has been shaped, looking beyond the issues of 2020 and more.
Dr. Michael P. McDonald is Professor of Political Science at University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from University of California, San Diego and B.S. in Economics from California Institute of Technology. He held a one-year post-doc fellowship at Harvard University and previously taught at Vanderbilt University; University of Illinois, Springfield; and George Mason University.His research interests are in the areas of elections and methodology. His voter turnout research shows that turnout is not declining, the ineligible population is rising. He is a co-principle investigator on the Public Mapping Project, a project to encourage public participation in redistricting.