While invalid voting is often treated as protest behavior in an electoral context, its association with actual political protests has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The relative scarcity of research on the topic is likely due to the hybrid nature of invalid voting as a both formal and informal political gesture. The novel availability of event-based data for public protests in Latin America allows for testing whether their occurrence is connected with changes in spoiled and blank ballots. Using an appropriate dynamic regression model covering variations in the 148 intervals between Latin American legislative elections in the 1979–2021 period, this study finds a strong connection between the emergence of antigovernment protests and surges in invalid voting (and vice versa). This relationship still holds at parity of economic conditions and it is reinforced by a lack of alternation in the party of power. Conversely, the appearance of workers’ strikes appears to work as a substitute for this behavior, which is also chosen by voters when democracy deteriorates, while corruption has no independent impact on invalid voting. Overall this work’s findings promise to send the research agenda on invalid voting in a new direction, previously unexplored because of an absence of fitting data.

虽然无效投票通常被视为选举背景下的抗议行为，但其与实际政治抗议的关联尚未得到实证证明。关于该主题的研究相对缺乏可能是由于无效投票作为正式和非正式政治姿态的混合性质。拉丁美洲公众抗议活动的基于事件的数据的新颖可用性可以测试其发生是否与废选票和空白选票的变化有关。这项研究使用适当的动态回归模型，涵盖了 1979 年至 2021 年期间拉丁美洲立法选举之间 148 个间隔的变化，发现反政府抗议的出现与无效投票激增之间存在密切联系（反之亦然）。这种关系在经济条件下仍然保持平等，并且由于政党权力的缺乏更替而得到加强。相反，工人罢工的出现似乎可以作为这种行为的替代品，当民主恶化时，选民也会选择这种行为，而腐败对无效投票没有独立的影响。总体而言，这项工作的发现有望将无效投票的研究议程推向一个新的方向，而此前由于缺乏拟合数据而未曾探索过这一方向。