Imai, Kosuke and Kabir Khanna. (2016). ``Improving Ecological Inference by Predicting Individual Ethnicity from Voter Registration Record.'' Political Analysis, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring), pp. 263-272.

In both political behavior research and voting rights litigation, turnout and vote choice for different racial groups are often inferred using aggregate election results and racial composition. Over the past several decades, many statistical methods have been proposed to address this ecological inference problem. We propose an alternative method to reduce aggregation bias by predicting individual-level ethnicity from voter registration records. Building on the existing methodological literature, we use Bayes's rule to combine the Census Bureau's Surname List with various information from geocoded voter registration records. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology using approximately nine million voter registration records from Florida, where self-reported ethnicity is available. We find that it is possible to reduce the false positive rate among Black and Latino voters to 6% and 3%, respectively, while maintaining the true positive rate above 80%. Moreover, we use our predictions to estimate turnout by race and find that our estimates yields substantially less amounts of bias and root mean squared error than standard ecological inference estimates. We provide open-source software to implement the proposed methodology. The open-source software is available for implementing the proposed methodology.

Khanna, Kabir, Kosuke Imai, Santiago Olivella, and Evan T. Rosenman. ``wru: Who Are You? Bayesian Prediction of Racial Category Using Surname and Geolocation.'' available through The Comprehensive R Archive Network and GitHub

Imai, Kosuke, Santiago Olivella, and Evan T. Rosenman. (2022). ``Addressing Census data problems in race imputation via fully Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding and name supplements.'' Science Advances, Vol. 8, No. 49, pp. 1-10.

Rosenman, Evan T.R., Santiago Olivella, and Kosuke Imai. (2023). ``Race and ethnicity data for first, middle, and last names.'' Scientific Data, Vol. 10, No. 299, pp. 1-11.

McCartan, Cory, Robin Fisher, Jacob Goldin, Daniel E. Ho, Kosuke Imai. ``Estimating Racial Disparities When Race is Not Observed.'' Journal of the American Statistical Association, Forthcoming.