Michael Herndon

Michael Herndon (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mexican American and Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research lies at the intersection of political psychology and election science. Because elections in the United States are localized and overseen by thousands of separate election administrators operating under vastly different political, legal, and professional environments, he is interested in how human elements fill in the gaps, cracks, and discretion of election administration. His most recent work, published in Political Research Quarterly, uses experiments to measure how people’s personal biases can affect the way they adjudicate the validity of VBM signatures. At the Voting Rights Project he coauthored an expert report in Reyes v. Chilton, demonstrating that three counties in Eastern Washington had discriminatory signature verification requirements and wrongfully disenfranchised over 4,500 Latino voters due to biases inherent in the signature review process. He has also co-authored several policy reports with the Voting Rights Project, including four different election reports commissioned by the California Secretary of State’s Office. Michael holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA.