Public Opin Q. 2001 Spring;65(1):22-44.
The key to understanding why people overreport is that those who are under the most pressure to vote are the ones most likely to misrepresent their behavior when they fail to do so. Among all nonvoters, the most likely to overreport are the more educated, partisan, and religious, and those who have been contacted and asked to vote for a candidate. The greater the concentration of African-American and Latino nonvoters in a district, the greater the probability of overreporting in those districts, both among those in the relevant minority group and among white Anglos. White nonvoters are more likely to overreport in the Deep South than elsewhere. Overreporting matters: using reported votes in place of validated votes substantially distorts standard multivariate explanations of voting, increasing the apparent importance of independent variables that are related in the same direction to both overreporting and voting and sharply decreasing the apparent importance of independent variables related in opposing directions to those two variables.
理解人们为何过度报告的关键在于，那些承受最大投票压力的人，在未能投票时最有可能歪曲自己的行为。在所有未投票者中，最有可能过度报告的是那些受教育程度更高、党派偏见更强、宗教信仰更虔诚的人，以及那些被联系并被要求投票给某个候选人的人。在一个地区，非裔美国人和拉丁裔非选民的集中程度越高，这些地区过度报告的可能性就越大，无论是在相关少数群体中还是在白人盎格鲁撒克逊人中都是如此。在深南地区，白人非选民更有可能过度报告。过度报告很重要：用报告的选票代替经过验证的选票，会极大地扭曲投票的标准多元解释，增加与过度报告和投票都呈相同方向相关的自变量的明显重要性，同时大幅降低与这两个变量呈相反方向相关的自变量的明显重要性。
