For the 2019 election, as President Mauricio Macri’s popularity waned, Cambiemos mayors needed to decouple their reelection prospects from those of their presidential candidate. This endeavor required broker networks capable of supporting their campaigns by customizing messages, resources, and ballots to align with voters’ electoral preferences. This chapter explores how Cambiemos mayors in the Conurbano turned to these territorial network strategies. Using in-depth interviews and extensive fieldwork, the chapter illustrates how local Cambiemos candidates leveraged these strategies to survive the election. The chapter also quantitatively tests the hypothesis that brokers are crucial for mayoral candidates’ electoral survival when their presidential candidate is underperforming. It particularly focuses on ticket splitting as a key method for candidates to detach from their parties, serving as an effective proxy for assessing their network strategies. Analyzing the distribution of clipped ballots across electoral circuits offers a deeper understanding of how Cambiemos mayors used their punteros to strategically separate from Macri.

This chapter provides and overview of the book and uses the case of the 2013 election reform bill in North Carolina to illustrate the key arguments of the manuscript.Partisan majorities in states often change laws regarding the ballot format to help them remain in power.This chapter also describes the basic ballot types used in the U.S. and summarizes the findings of each chapter.

This chapter provides detailed case studies of recent ballot reform efforts in Michigan and North Carolina.These states have detailed data on the level of straight ticket voting by county. These data are used to demonstrate how county characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and poverty interact with straight ticket voting and ballot rolloff.We find a strong connection between straight-ticket voting, minority populations, and ballot rolloff.This chapter concludes with analysis of recent changes in Iowa and West Virginia.The findings for Iowa suggest that the effects of ballot design changes are muted in areas that have lower proportions of non-white residents and that are less densely populated.