Former Congressman Tip O’Neill famously said “all politics is local.”

The same applies to election administration in the U.S., which is markedly decentralized. On Election Day, county- and city-level poll workers are the people who make sure voters can smoothly cast their ballots for measures and candidates vying for offices spanning all levels of government.

But this fundamental democratic function isn’t free, and election administrators often say they have a lot to do on limited budgets, research shows. State and local governments — not the federal government — are usually responsible for election administration costs.

Some of the biggest ongoing costs are related to statewide voter registration rolls, which can cost millions of dollars a year to build and maintain, according to to a 2022 report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart III.

Costs associated with individual elections include staffing, supplies for polling places and postage for mail-in ballots. Local election agencies have to pay for return postage in 19 states, plus Washington, D.C., but the U.S. Postal Service will typically deliver any ballot that lacks enough postage, billing the appropriate election agency later, according to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.

Longer-term costs include upgrading equipment such as scanners that process paper ballots.

Nearly 80% of voters used paper-and-scanner technology during the 2020 election. Most of the remaining voters used direct-recording electronic machines. With those devices, voters use touch screens or push buttons to record their votes digitally, which may or may not include a paper trail.

Nationally, equipment costs would run $100 million to $300 million yearly if each scanner were replaced at the end of its useful life, around ten years, according to the MIT report. As of 2022, the voting equipment used in 24 states was over a decade old, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

“Election officials are used to ‘making do’ with what they have,” Stewart writes. “They often express pride in pulling off the complicated logistical maneuvers necessary to conduct elections on a shoestring budget.”

Revenue from sales and property taxes are one major source of funding for elections, according to the 2022 MIT report. While federal grants have sporadically been available since 2002, “there is no ongoing federal mechanism for funding the general expenses of administering elections,” according to a September 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service.

The question of who pays to run elections gained national news attention during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were, for example, sudden additional costs related to widespread mail-in voting and personal protective equipment for election workers and volunteers.

And there’s not solely government money involved.

For the 2020 election cycle, “private individuals funded grant programs for state and local election administration that were particularly notable in their scale and sources,” according to the CRS report.

Philanthropist Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Meta, were the leading donors, committing up to $419.5 million for election administration, including for personal protective equipment.

That commitment was roughly 20% of one estimate of the typical cost of administering elections across the U.S. and about half the $825 million Congress appropriated for state and local election administration in 2020. (That federal appropriation was atypically large due to the pandemic-era challenges — by comparison, Congress appropriated nothing for state and local elections during the 2016 cycle, according to the CRS report.)

A raft of misinformation about the Chan-Zuckerberg funding followed President Joe Biden’s November 2020 win over former President Donald Trump. At the same time, Republican state legislators and conservative groups pushed to remove private dollars from election administration.

There are now 28 states that limit, regulate or prohibit private or charitable funding for elections, according to the NCSL. In 2020, the electoral votes from 22 of those states went to Trump while five went to Biden. Nebraska, which allocates its electoral votes differently from nearly every other state and often splits its electoral votes, sent one to Biden and four to Trump in 2020.

All legislation related to private funding of elections has been passed since 2020, according to the NCSL.

With the new legislation and a variety of election financing systems across the country, it can be confusing to know where to begin to help audiences understand how their elections are funded. These research-based tips will give you a solid base for reporting on election administration funding in your coverage area.

1. Get to know state rules on how localities can finance elections.

Start with this list, compiled by the NCSL, of states that have passed laws about private funding of elections. Note whether your state prohibits all private funding, or limits such funding in some cases.

Alabama, for example, prohibits state and local election officials from soliciting or accepting “any donation in the form of money, grants, property, or personal services from an individual or a nongovernmental entity for the purpose of funding election-related expenses or voter education, voter outreach, or voter registration programs.”

But Alabama election officials can accept a donation of physical space for voting provided by private entities, such as a brick-and-mortar business donating its store for use as a polling place. If there is a state public health emergency, election officials in that state can accept “the donation of items for the preservation or protection of the public health.”

In South Carolina, by contrast, state and county election agencies cannot accept “gifts, donations, or funding from private individuals, corporations, partnerships, trusts, or any third party not provided through ordinary state or county appropriations,” without exceptions. And in Texas, local election officials cannot accept financial contributions over $1,000 without written notice from the secretary of state, who must first obtain unanimous approval from key state leaders, including the governor.

2. Ask election officials if they have enough funding. If not, how much do they need and for what?

Legal scholars have described adequate election funding as a fundamental pillar of the right to vote. “Unlike most other rights, the right to vote relies on governments to build, fund, and administer elections systems,” write law professors Joshua Sellers and Justin Weinstein-Tull in a 2021 New York University Law Review article. “This obligation is not ancillary to the right to vote; it is foundational to it.”

Ask local election officials if they have enough funding for 2024. If not, how much do they think they need and what specific outcomes would additional funding help achieve? What tradeoffs would there be — would more funding for elections mean less funding for other needs?

While election administrators will likely say they would gladly take more funding, there is scant research that provides points of comparison to assess outcomes of increased funding — for example, whether election agencies serving similar constituencies do their jobs differently depending on funding levels.

3. Don’t assume localities with high tax revenues spend more on election administration.

Recent research has focused on parsing the local costs of elections. In a 2021 Vanderbilt Law Review article, Sellers and law professor Roger Michalski seek to correct what they call the “shamefully inadequate amount of information about how much our elections cost.”

Sellers and Michalski use a “novel and painstakingly hand-coded dataset,” on election costs at the local and state levels from 2010 to 2017 across four states that make up nearly one-third of the national population: California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Part of the challenge in analyzing election spending data across and within states is that agencies record their election-related expenses differently. The authors found that some agencies provide detailed expenditures down to the cost of postage, while others more broadly record costs.

They do not find connections between election funding and demographic factors such as race, poverty and educational attainment.

“Election spending in majority-minority communities seems largely indistinguishable from spending in predominantly white communities,” Sellers and Michalski write. “In short, basic assumptions one might have about resource allocation are brought into question.”

Sellers and Michalski also estimate that election spending in the four states is typically in the range of $4.50 to $8.50 per capita. This is in line with other research, including a 2018 data collection project on elections held in more than half of states from 2009 to 2016, led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That research estimates an average U.S. cost per voter of $8 per election, but substantial variation across states, with costs as high as $15 per voter in Florida and as low as $2 per voter in Michigan.

Sellers and Michalski also find wide variation in election spending. For example, in California many cities “spend less than a dollar per person per year on election expenditures, while others spend many multiples more,” they write. Those findings hold for the other states in the study, and, generally, wealthier cities do not necessarily spend more per capita to administer elections than cities with lower tax revenues.

Spending tends to be higher in areas where governments overlap: “In many places, municipalities and counties work in concert to organize, run, and fund elections,” Sellers and Michalski write.

Election administration spending can vary even within counties. Someone living in a large city that is part of a county with sprawling suburbs might take part in elections funded at both the city and county levels, while a suburban voter might only have elections funded by the county.

4. Explain why election administration funding matters.

One big reason funding matters: Election officials need to be able to purchase technology and ballot designs that accurately records voters’ choices.

For example, the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was notably affected by punch card ballots, with so-called “hanging chads” making voter intentions unclear and directly leading to the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which provided federal funding to upgrade local voting systems.

Scholars who study elections use something called the residual vote rate to measure the relative ability of election agencies to perform their fundamental task of recording voter intentions. As Stewart writes in a 2018 MIT Election Lab blog post, “the number of residual votes is usually calculated by taking the number of people who turned out and subtracting the number of votes cast for candidates.”

In other words, a residual vote is when a ballot is cast that includes votes for some but not all races on the ballot. The authors of a 2020 paper in the Public Administration Review explore residual vote rates in North Carolina by dividing the number of ballots cast in presidential election years from 1996 to 2012 by the number of votes for president.

Presidential ballots often also include races for local or state offices, and ballot measures. For example, a residual vote would be counted when a ballot includes a vote for a senate race and a ballot measure, but is missing a vote for president.

“Though some proportion of residual votes might be the choice of the voter (some people choose not to vote for particular offices), scholarship revealed that residual votes were systematically related to the type of voting equipment and ballot design,” the authors write.

Sufficient funding generally allows people running and working for organizations to develop expertise and “provide for better technology and assistance,” the authors write, citing past research. The authors further explain in the paper that “the residual vote rate is an important managerial outcome of election administration.”

Although the authors analyze only one state, they note that, over time, they are able to explore residual voting in the same local administration organizations, which differ in their ability to run elections but have the same funding mechanisms.

“We find that both managerial capacity and better technology significantly reduce the residual vote rate as would be predicted by theory and literature,” the authors conclude.

5. Know that the health of the U.S. economy may affect election administration spending.

Research has found that how the broader economy is doing can affect spending on election administration.

A 2020 paper in American Politics Research examines county-level spending on elections from 2005 to 2016 in Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina and Ohio. This timeframe overlapped with the Great Recession, which began in late 2007 and ended in mid-2009. The authors note they chose those states based primarily on the availability of detailed financial data for county election offices.

During and after the recession, election-related spending in these states fell sharply, and stayed lower than before the recession, even as the economy slowly began to recover.

“Unfortunately, just because democracy may need significant funds to conduct an election, it does not always mean that election administrators have sufficient resources,” the authors conclude.

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At first glance, registering to vote in the U.S. may seem easy: Adults fill out a form and submit it online, in person or through the mail. But getting onto a state’s voter roll — and staying there — can be complicated. It’s also a key reason more Americans don’t participate in elections. 

All states except North Dakota require voter registration for federal, state and local elections. The U.S., unlike many other democratic nations, puts the burden of registration on its citizens.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, the government creates voter rolls automatically from census data, according to a 2020 report from the Pew Research Center. America’s neighbor to the north, Canada, maintains a national database of registered voters who are added automatically based on data collected across government agencies there, including birth and death records and income tax filings.

Pew notes that half of the 226 countries and territories included in the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network have some type of registration mandate. The network, launched at the United Nations in 1998, is a global repository of election-related information.

In 2022, 69% of U.S. citizens aged 18 years and older were registered to vote, according to a report the U.S. Census Bureau released last year. Registration rates ranged from 61% in North Carolina to 83% in Oregon.

The four most populous states — California, Texas, Florida and New York — had some of the lowest registration rates: 67%, 65%, 63% and 66%, respectively.

U.S. election oversight

U.S. elections are broadly governed by federal laws such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. All three aimed to broaden the number of people participating in American elections.

The National Voter Registration Act significantly expanded residents’ opportunities to register to vote. It’s commonly referred to as the “Motor Voter Act” because it requires states to allow residents to register to vote at the same time they apply for or renew their driver’s licenses. The law also mandates that residents be able to register at certain state and local offices, including public assistance offices.

There’s no national list of registered voters or people eligible to vote, however. Individual states and the District of Columbia maintain their own voter rolls. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia share data through the Electronic Registration Information Center to help one another keep track of voters who move or die and prevent duplicate registrations.

Federal law forbids people who are not U.S. citizens from voting in federal elections, but states decide who can participate in state and local elections. While all states prohibit non-citizens from voting in state elections, a few cities in California, Maryland and Vermont allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, according to Ballotpedia.

Why voter registration rates differ

A big reason voter registration rates differ so much is because each state has its own election policies and processes, which can make registering easy or difficult. In addition, local election offices vary in how they interpret those rules, how they educate and engage with residents, and how they maintain their voter lists.

To complete this first part of the voting process, U.S. citizens must:

• Make sure they are eligible to register. Adults living in the U.S. can register to vote in federal, state and local elections if they are U.S. citizens and meet their state’s residency requirements. Although citizens cannot vote until they are 18 years old, many states allow them to register starting at age 16. Some states prohibit certain groups from voting, including people who have been convicted of a felony and adults with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities.
• Determine where, when and how to register. In most states, residents can register online any time, provided they have access to the internet, can locate the registration form for their state online and can fill out a digital document. Those who cannot or do not want to register online can do it by mail or visit a local election office in person during its business hours.
• Correctly complete a voter registration application. Lots of people make mistakes or leave out key information on their applications. Applicants in the three states that require them to answer a question about their race or ethnicity might skip it if they aren’t sure what to write. Occasionally, applicants get their birthdates, driver’s license numbers or other identification numbers wrong.
• Submit it before their state’s deadline. Voter registration deadlines vary. In Texas, for example, citizens must be registered at least 30 days before Election Day. In Alabama, they must be registered 15 days prior. It’s 10 days in New York. In 22 other states and the capital, citizens can register to vote and cast ballots on the same day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
• Promptly fix any errors or provide missing information. Local election officials review voter registration applications and notify people needing to correct an error or provide additional information. If applicants don’t share their phone numbers on their registration application, election officials will reach out by mail. If issues are not resolved by the voter registration deadline, the applicant will not be added to the voter roll in time for their ballots to count.
• Check on their voter registration status. After registering to vote, it’s a good idea for residents to periodically check their registration status. Election offices remove people from the voter rolls for various reasons, which also differ by state. Officials in Massachusetts, for instance, can remove residents who don’t participate in city and town censuses. States can cancel the registrations of residents deemed to be “inactive voters” — a term defined differently across states. Voters in Wyoming can have their registrations canceled after not voting in one general election.

Each step can be a stumbling block that ultimately results in someone not being able to register, political scientists Christopher B. Mann of Skidmore College and Lisa A. Bryant of California State University Fresno write in a 2020 paper, published in the journal Electoral Studies.

“It is a cliché that ‘getting to the starting line’ is often more difficult than running the race, and this sentiment seems applicable for many American citizens when it comes to voting: The requirement to register is a costly and time-consuming obstacle to casting a ballot,” Mann and Bryant write.

Voter registration rates among demographic groups

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrates substantial disparities in voter registration rates across states and the District of Columbia. The Census Bureau provides a variety of reports and spreadsheets containing estimates of the number and percentage of people from each state who are registered to vote. It offers data broken down age, sex, race, household income, employment status and other demographic factors.

White U.S. citizens are much more likely to be registered to vote than citizens of other racial and ethnic groups. Nationally, about 71% of white adult citizens, 64% of Black adult citizens, 60% of Asian adult citizens and 58% of Hispanic adult citizens were registered to vote in November 2022, according to Census Bureau estimates.

Some other disparities:

• Older adult citizens are more likely to be registered than younger ones. While 77% of citizens aged 65 years and older were registered to vote in November 2022, 63% of citizens aged 25 to 34 and 49% of citizens aged 18 to 24 were.
• Voter registration rates differed by job status in November 2022. For example, 60% of unemployed adult citizens reporting being registered compared with 72% of self-employed adult citizens and 79% with government jobs.
• Adult citizens with lower incomes are less likely to register to vote than those with higher incomes. For example, 83% of adult citizens with family incomes of $150,000 per year or higher were registered to vote in November 2022. Meanwhile, 58% of adult citizens with family incomes of $15,000 to $19,999 were.

KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, used Census Bureau data to create an interactive database that lets the public search and sort voter registration rates by race and ethnicity in even-numbered years from November 2014 to November 2022. It shows stark differences across racial groups in certain parts of the country.

A few examples:

• The voter registration rate among Hispanic adult citizens in November 2022 was lowest in Mississippi, at 23%, and highest in Minnesota, at 75%.
• In Iowa, 76% of white adult citizens were registered to vote, compared with 41% of Black adult citizens, 45% of Asian adult citizens and 58% of Hispanic adult citizens.
• In 10 states, fewer than half of Black adult citizens were registered to vote in November 2022. In 15 states, fewer than half of Asian adult citizens were.

A look at academic research

Scholars have documented problems with the voter registration process across the U.S. for decades. In recent years, they have focused on voter education and outreach as well as voter list maintenance, a process of updating the rolls of registered voters that includes removing people who have died, moved to other states or lost their eligibility to vote.

Researchers stress that registration rates would be higher if citizens understood the rules around voter registration and the consequences of not following them. However, the quality of voter education programs varies from state to state and even from election office to election office, studies conducted by Thessalia Merivaki, an associate professor in American politics at Mississippi State University, have found.

Merivaki is among a small group of researchers who study voter registration, education and outreach. Several of her most recent studies focus on Florida, probably in part because the state’s broad open records laws make it much easier to obtain data and reports there than in many other states. Two chapters of Merivaki’s 2021 book, “The Administration of Voter Registration: Expanding the Electorate Across and Within the States,” also focus exclusively on Florida election administration.

When Merivaki and her colleague, Mara Suttmann-Lea, an assistant professor of American politics at Connecticut College, studied the education and outreach efforts of Florida’s 67 county election offices, they learned they varied considerably. Those offices “enjoy significant discretion in how they engage in voter education and the resources they dedicate to these efforts,” the two researchers write in a 2022 paper published in Policy Studies.

When Merivaki and Suttmann-Lea studied states’ efforts to improve voter education after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, they discovered some states did more than others. In fact, they found that some states’ improvement plans probably did not comply with the federal law, created in the wake of the controversial presidential election results in Florida in 2000. The legislation provided $3.9 billion to help states modernize their election equipment and processes.

Some states did not incorporate the federal law’s “core voter education provisions, particularly voting technology demonstrations, voter guides, and toll-free hotlines” in their plans for improving voter education, Merivaki and Suttmann-Lea write in a 2022 analysis in the Election Law Journal. They also note “differences in the inclusion of education materials for language minority and disabled voters, suggesting limits on compliance with existing federal laws.”

Once citizens are added to the voter rolls, they can be removed, though. Election researchers have raised questions about the effectiveness and lawfulness of states’ procedures for maintaining voter lists.

List maintenance is meant to protect against fraud and help election officials estimate the number of voting machines, ballots, poll workers and polling locations they will need on Election Day. But that process also is flawed. It can remove eligible voters en masse and with little notice.

Some residents do not realize they have been taken off the voter roll until they show up at their polling place on Election Day. As a result, some Americans who are eligible to vote either don’t vote or vote using a provisional ballot, which is kept apart from regular ballots until election officers determine whether the individual who filled it out is eligible to vote.

Recent academic research also indicates:

• Local election offices vary in the way they process voter registration applications, which seems to contribute to big differences in the percentage of applications each office rejects. When researchers studied the issue in Florida, they found that rejection rates also varied seasonally, with fewer applications being rejected in October — the cut-off there for applying to register to vote in November elections.
• In Florida, younger voters and racial and ethnic minorities were more likely to have their voter registration applications put “on hold,” meaning they needed to correct errors and provide additional information before their applications can be processed.
• Compliance with Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act has been “spotty and variable over time and across states.”
• Some states have started automatically prompting residents to register to vote when they visit a government office. While voter registration has risen in these states, the registration rates of underrepresented groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans appear unchanged.

We elaborate on these findings below. We have summarized four peer-reviewed papers and a report from the University of Southern California that investigate these issues. We plan to update this article occasionally as new studies and data become available.

Research roundup

Voter registration challenges

Registered, But Not Quite: Processing Pending and Incomplete Registrations
Thessalia Merivaki. Chapter 6 of The Administration of Voter Registration: Expanding the Electorate Across and Within the States, 2021.

The study: In this book chapter, Merivaki examines records from two county election offices in Florida to better understand why some voter registration applications are placed “on hold” and which individuals are more likely to have their applications put in this category. She compares records from 2016 from Pinellas and Polk counties, which are located in the same region of Florida and have populations of similar size.

Between Jan. 1, 2016 and Oct. 18, 2016, a total of 2,132 applications in Polk County and 3,892 in Pinellas County were placed “on hold,” meaning they were either incomplete or denied. The deadline to register to vote in the general election that year in that state was Oct. 18.

The findings: The most common reason applications were placed on hold was because of a missing or incorrect identification number such as a driver’s license number or the last four digits of the applicant’s social security number, Merivaki found. In Polk County, 55% of “on hold” registrations were deemed incomplete because of this. In Pinellas County, 31% were. The most common reason for being denied: Having a felony conviction.

Merivaki learned that individuals with “on hold” applications “were overall young, racially diverse, predominantly registering as NPAs [not having a political party affiliation] or Democrats, and slightly more male than female,” she writes. However, Black applicants were much less likely than white applicants to be placed on hold because of missing or incorrect identification information. Hispanic applicants, on the other hand, were much more likely than white, non-Hispanic applicants to be placed on hold for this reason.

Applicants who failed to disclose their race were 55% more likely to have their application put “on hold” because of missing or incorrect information than those who disclosed it.

In the author’s words: “While disclosing one’s gender and/or race is not required [in Florida] to register to vote, it offers an opportunity to assess whether undisclosed information affects the prospects of one’s application being classified as ‘incomplete’ or denied, after taking any other factors into consideration,” Merivaki writes.

Access Denied? Investigating Voter Registration Rejections in Florida
Thessalia Merivaki. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, January 2021.

The study: Merivaki examines monthly voter registration reports from each of Florida’s 67 county election offices to better understand the reasons why they rejected tens of thousands of voter registration applications between January and December 2012. Florida requires voters to be registered 29 days before a general election.

The findings: Election offices, on average, rejected about 11% of all registration applications submitted that year. But rejection rates varied by month and county. Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, had the highest monthly rejection rate — it rejected 56% of applications submitted in March 2012. Duval County’s rejection rate for the year averaged 15%, compared with about 11% in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, and 6% in Orange County, which includes Orlando.

Merivaki discovered that county election offices were least likely to reject applications in October 2012, when the rejection rate statewide averaged 3%. Oct. 9 was the deadline to register to vote in Florida’s November elections. She writes that the lower rejection rate in October suggests “administrative issues in processing voter registration applications when the volume of voter registration applications dramatically increases in a short period of time.”

She also discovered rejection rates were lower when a larger share of applications went through organizations such as public libraries and military recruitment offices. A 10% increase in voter registration applications submitted this way was associated with a 3% reduction in the rejection rate, she finds.

In the author’s words: “Given that the influx of voter registration applications peaks during the last weeks prior to the voter registration deadline, and so do the rates of rejected voter registrations, it appears that voter registration rejections stem from administrative challenges in processing applications in short time intervals,” Merivaki writes. “However, due to the fact the rates of rejected voter registrations also increase as early as eight months prior to the voter registration closing book date may have to do with the voters’ capacity to avoid errors when completing voter registration forms.”

Voter list maintenance issues

The Racial Burden of Voter List Maintenance Errors: Evidence from Wisconsin’s Supplemental Movers Poll Books
Gregory A. Huber, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse and Katie Steele. Science Advances, February 2021.

The study: This paper estimates how often voters in Wisconsin are incorrectly flagged as having moved to a new address, prompting the state to either remove them from its voter roll or start a process that can lead to their voter registration being cancelled. “It is important to understand how often these registrants did not move, and how often such an error is not corrected by the postcard confirmation process, because uncorrected errors make it more difficult for a registrant to subsequently vote,” write the researchers, Gregory Huber of Yale University and Marc Meredith, Michael Morse and Katie Steele of the University of Pennsylvania.

When Wisconsin residents change the address on their driver’s license or file a change of address through the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address System, the Electronic Registration Information Center reports that information to Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Election Commission then sends postcards to people who are registered to vote asking them to confirm whether they have moved.

The findings: In October 2017, ERIC notified Wisconsin that 341,855 voters had potentially moved. Of those, 6,153 responded to the state’s postcard to confirm they remained eligible to vote at the address they had used to register. The remaining 335,702 voters were initially removed from the state voter roll.

Huber and his colleagues estimate that 4% of voters who had been flagged as suspected movers and did not respond to postcards voted in 2018 and still lived at the same address they used to register. This represents at least 9,000 people. Racial and ethnic minorities were about 4 percentage points more likely than white residents to vote at the address that ERIC had flagged as being out of date.

In the authors’ words: “Our results show why it is essential to make registrants aware if their registration is being moved to inactive status and to continue to alert these registrants to upcoming elections so that they know when and where to vote if they still reside at their address of registration.”

Complying with federal election law

Race, Poverty, and the Redistribution of Voting Rights
Jamila Michener, Poverty and Public Policy, June 2016.

The study: Jamila Michener of Cornell University examines the reasons states vary in their compliance with Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act Of 1993, which requires public assistance agencies to offer voter registration services to everyone applying for or renewing their government benefits. She looks at changes in compliance between 1995 and 2012.

The findings: Compliance with the federal law was higher when the president was a Democrat and lower when legislatures were more heavily Republican. Race played a key role in determining whether states worked to bring people with lower incomes into the election process, Michener finds.

She also finds that compliance was lower in states where a larger percentage of the population was Black. Meanwhile, she adds, that “[h]igher percentages of Black bureaucrats are associated with increased compliance while growing ranks of Latinos in state welfare bureaucracies are associated with decreases in compliance.” Michener explains that she is unsure why compliance falls under Latino leadership. But she notes that Latino bureaucrats “are likely better educated and more economically advantaged than other Latinos,” which she adds “can translate into less liberal attitudes, less of a sense of linked fate, and an increased desire to disassociate oneself from more marginal co-ethnics.”

In the author’s words: “These findings raise concerns about the political equality of disadvantaged citizens and underscore the need to scrutinize the outcomes of expansionary voting policies. Even more broadly, this research shows how the entanglement of race and poverty in a federalist polity frustrates efforts to advance participatory equality.”

Automatic voter registration

Effects of Automatic Voter Registration in the United States
Eric McGhee and Mindy Romero. Report from the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, 2020.

The study: This report looks at how introducing automatic voter registration affected registration rates in 11 states. In most of those states, eligible residents were automatically registered to vote based on information they provided their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, unless they actively declined. The authors, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Mindy Romero of the University of Southern California, note the report’s conclusions “are not firm” because Americans nationwide had reduced access to government agencies at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings: While voter registration rose after states implemented AVR initiatives — starting with Oregon in 2016 — the researchers are unsure how much of the increase is a direct result of AVR. In Oregon, for example, 722,823 people who had not previously been registered were added to the state’s voter roll between January 2016 and January 2020. Another 1.2 million Oregonians already registered to vote updated their addresses.

McGhee and Romero note there is evidence, from Oregon and California in particular, that AVR “adds new registrants consistently throughout the election cycle in a way that could have lasting effects on the state’s overall registration rate.” However, AVR does not appear to improve the relative registration rates of underrepresented groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans.

In the authors’ words: “The data suggest the reform probably encourages some new people to register who would not have done so without AVR. However, the effect on overall registration is ambiguous because most AVR increases we estimate are small and the reform is still relatively new.”

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U.S. citizens ages 18 and older who are registered to vote can cast ballots in local, state and federal elections. But states, which conduct and administer many elections, including federal elections, can also take away individuals’ right to vote for certain reasons.

A felony conviction, either in state or federal court, is one common way people lose the right to vote in the U.S. This process is commonly referred to as felony disenfranchisement. Because laws on felony disenfranchisement vary by state, there are a range of outcomes when it comes to the voting rights of those convicted of felonies. While nearly every state curtails voting for people convicted of felonies while they are incarcerated, not every felony conviction results in prison time.

Convictions can result from jury trials or plea deals, and the vast majority of criminal convictions in the U.S. are obtained by guilty plea, according to a 2023 report from the American Bar Association. Most people in jail for misdemeanor offenses or while awaiting court hearings can vote, but they face challenges, such as a lack of opportunities to register, according to reporting from Matt Vasilogambros of Stateline, a nonprofit news organization.

Felony disenfranchisement laws by state

“In 11 states, felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes, or require a governor’s pardon for voting rights to be restored, face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) or require additional action before voting rights can be restored,” according to research from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

• Those 11 strictest states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming, according to the NCSL. Florida “disenfranchises more returning citizens than any other state,” write the authors of a January 2023 paper in the Vanderbilt Law Review.
• There are 14 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote while incarcerated, as well as while completing probation or parole, according to the NCSL. These states are Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
• There are 23 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote only while incarcerated, according to the NCSL, with the right automatically reinstated after time served. These states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington.       
• People convicted of felonies in the District of Columbia, Maine and Vermont do not lose their voting rights and can vote while incarcerated.
• In some states, people convicted of a felony can vote in the state where they live even if they wouldn’t be eligible in the state where they were convicted. Journalists covering this topic should consult legislation and reach out to legal experts to understand their state rules for restoring voting rights. For a quick look at restoring voting rights for people with criminal convictions, check this U.S. Department of Justice state-by-state guide.

Brief historical context of felony disenfranchisement

More than 4 million people in the U.S. are barred from voting because of a felony conviction, according to estimates from The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for “effective and humane responses to crime.” News outlets commonly cite reports and policy briefs from The Sentencing Project, and their data is used in academic research, including in one of the papers featured below.

Over the past quarter century, about half of state legislatures have moved to restore voting rights to those disenfranchised due to a felony conviction.

“Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights to people living with felony convictions,” according to an October 2023 report from The Sentencing Project. “As a result, over 2 million Americans have regained the right to vote.”

State felony disenfranchisement laws arose during the post-Civil War era, when the Reconstruction Act of 1867 affirmed universal suffrage for all men.

“At that point, two interconnected trends combined to make disenfranchisement a major obstacle for newly enfranchised Black voters,” according to a 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “First, lawmakers — especially in the South — implemented a slew of criminal laws designed to target Black citizens. And nearly simultaneously, many states enacted broad disenfranchisement laws that revoked voting rights from anyone convicted of any felony.”

Mississippi is something of an outlier among the strictest states in that people convicted of felonies in federal court do not lose voting rights there, but people convicted of felonies in state courts for a range of crimes do lose the right to vote, according to the U.S. Department of Justice guide on voting rights for people with criminal convictions. The right to vote in Mississippi can only be restored by pardon or legislative action, according to the guide.

Rules for restoring voting rights in states that allow it can also vary. Even if the right is “automatically” reinstated, often individuals must still proactively re-register to vote, according to the NCSL.

Below, we have gathered and summarized six studies that explore demographic trends in felony disenfranchisement as well as how felony disenfranchisement affects political engagement and electoral democracy in U.S. states. The research roundup is followed by story ideas and interview questions for journalists.

The findings show …

• Public health outcomes tend to be worse in states where democratic processes are affected by policies such as felony disenfranchisement.
• People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia and when they support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs.
• Felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher where Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms.
• Restoring voting rights to people convicted of felonies is unlikely to meaningfully affect election results — but those who have their voting rights restored tend to feel they personally have more of a say in how their state governments operate.

Research roundup

Electoral Democracy and Working-Age Mortality
Jennifer Karas Montez, Kent Jason Cheng and Jacob Grumbach. The Milbank Quarterly, May 2023.

The study: The authors explore the relationship between the democratic health of a state and the physical health of people aged 25 to 64 in that state. They use the State Democracy Index, which measures the health of each state’s democratic processes based on 51 indicators, such as felony disenfranchisement, the availability of absentee voting and voter registration requirements. (The index was developed by Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.) The authors of the paper also use mortality rates for working-age people from the National Center for Health Statistics.

The findings: Working-age mortality and electoral democratic health are strongly associated, the authors find. States that improve their electoral democracy rating from “moderate” to “high” could see their working-age mortality rates fall 3.2% for men and 2.7% for women, according to estimates from statistical models the authors developed. The authors further estimate that state improvements to electoral democracy are associated with lower drug poisoning deaths for men and women, along with deaths from infectious diseases and homicides.

In the authors’ words: “According to historians … real improvements in population health in the mid- to late 1800s in industrializing countries such as England came about largely because of increased voting power of the public and, partly as a consequence, the rise of government interventions such as sanitation and clean water systems to improve social conditions for everyone. The historical association between rising democratic functioning and declining mortality is the flip side of today’s association between declining democratic functioning and rising mortality.”

Exclusionary Citizenship: Public Punitiveness and Support for Voting Restrictions
Cecilia Chouhy, Peter Lehmann and Alexa Singer. Justice Quarterly, August 2022.

The study: The authors explore links between individual support for “anti-welfarism, anti-immigrant attitudes and symbolic racism,” and support for disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies. Symbolic racism refers to “an apathy toward racial inequalities and a rejection of efforts to mitigate them,” the authors write. Specifically, the authors analyze results from 7,453 adults who took the 2020 American National Election Survey, a public opinion poll conducted during the weeks before and after presidential elections, operated by collaboration of several major universities.

The findings: People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia or symbolic racism. They also tend to support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs such as social security, education and aid to people with low incomes.

Support for the death penalty, likewise, is associated with support for felony disenfranchisement, the authors find. This association is strongest among Republicans, compared with Democrats. Among Democrats, attitudes aligned with symbolic racism are more likely to lead to support for felony disenfranchisement, compared with Republicans and independents.

In the authors’ words: “Our findings suggest that racial animosities, as well as xenophobia and support for immigration restrictions, not only are correlated with attitudes favoring punitive criminal justice policies but also explain differences in public support for punitive and non-punitive forms of voting restrictions.”

Sick And Tired of Being Excluded: Structural Racism in Disenfranchisement As A Threat To Population Health Equity
Patricia Homan and Tyson Brown. Health Affairs, February 2022.

The study: Does felony disenfranchisement affect health during middle and later life? The authors seek to shed light on this question. They use data from The Sentencing Project and the U.S. Census Bureau to assess whether Black people in each state are over- or under-represented among those disenfranchised due to felony convictions. Then, they compare that information with results from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan, a nationally representative survey of adults over age 51 that is “the most widely used dataset for studying health and well-being in later life,” the authors write. The datasets are from 2016, the most recent available.

“This study focused on Black and White people because they have the highest and lowest rates of disenfranchisement, respectively,” the authors explain in the paper. The final analysis excludes 15 states that have relatively small populations of Black people. The 35 states included account for 92% of the U.S. white population and 99% of the Black population, the authors write.

The findings: During the year studied, Black people were proportionally disenfranchised at a higher rate than white people in all 35 states, but particularly in states in the North, Mountain West and West. States in the South tended to have lower rates of proportional Black disenfranchisement. The authors find that felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher in states where older Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms and difficulty performing everyday tasks, such as using a telephone, shopping, bathing, dressing and getting in and out of bed. There was no association found between disenfranchisement among Black people and these health outcomes among white people.

In the authors’ words: “Consistent with the growing recognition that social policies are health policies, enacting laws to dismantle racialized felony disenfranchisement would likely improve the health of Black people and make progress toward achieving health equity.”

How Often do People Vote While Incarcerated? Evidence from Maine and Vermont
Ariel White and Avery Nguyen. The Journal of Politics, January 2022.

The study: The authors begin with data from the 2018 elections across 17 states that disenfranchise people while they are incarcerated for felony offenses and explore what the turnout rates would have to have been for those individuals to swing elections if they were granted the right to vote while incarcerated. The highest was Massachusetts, where the closest race in 2018 was decided by 654,161 votes — if the 8,870 people in that state who were disenfranchised due to felony incarcerations had been able to vote, they would have had to vote at a rate of 8,090%, an impossibility, and all would have had to have voted against the winning candidate. The lowest was Nevada, where those incarcerated for felonies would have had to vote at a rate of 36%, and all against the winning candidate, to swing the closest election held there that year.

The authors note that “studies of people who have regained their right to vote after incarceration find that they participate at much lower rates than other votes,” and then turn to whether the question of whether people incarcerated for felonies vote in the two states, Maine and Vermont, where they are never disenfranchised. They use prison records and state voter files to explore this question.

The findings: About one-in-three people serving time in Vermont for felony crimes were registered to vote during the 2018 election, while 8% of all people incarcerated for felonies voted. Similarly, in Maine, about one-third of those incarcerated for felony crimes were registered in 2018, while around 6% of people incarcerated for felonies cast ballots.

In the authors’ words: “This conclusion — that from-prison voter turnout is low even in Vermont and Maine and would be unlikely to affect state elections elsewhere — does not imply that we think states should avoid such policies. Rather, we suggest that policy makers should consider moral arguments rather than casual predictions about how these laws might change elections. People have made moral claims both for and against re-enfranchising people with felony convictions, highlighting ideas about paying one’s debt to society, the racist history of disfranchisement laws, and the meaning of citizenship. Our findings suggest that such normative debates are at least as relevant as the possibility of imprisoned voters changing election outcomes.”

Neighborhoods and Felony Disenfranchisement: The Case of New York City
Kevin Morris. Urban Affairs Review, September 2021.

The study: Morris explores whether voter turnout rates by neighborhood during the 2017 New York City mayoral election are linked to the proportion of people disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, by neighborhood. In particular, Morris identifies “lost voters,” which he defines as people with a history of voting before their disenfranchisement due to felony conviction. The data Morris analyzes includes felony incarceration and parole records since 1990, which he obtained via public records request from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Morris also uses a snapshot of publicly available, statewide voter data from April 2018, which includes whether individuals voted in the past as well as those who lost eligibility and were removed from the active voter file. He identifies 2,518 “lost voters” during the 2017 election.

The findings: Neighborhoods with lost voters also had lower average turnout rates in the 2017 election than the overall average neighborhood. In addition, neighborhoods without a lost voter during the 2016 general election that then lost at least one voter by 2017 also had lower turnout rates.

Morris identifies clear demographic differences between neighborhoods with lost voters and those without. The median income for a neighborhood with lost voters was $47,806, on average, compared with $65,495 in the overall average neighborhood. The percentage of Black people in neighborhoods with lost voters was 41%, on average, compared with the overall average of 22%. The percentage of Latino people in neighborhoods with lost voters was also higher than the overall average — 36% to 29%. Registered Democrats made up 77% of the electorate in neighborhoods with lost voters, on average, compared with an overall average of 68%.

In the author’s words: “Individuals who live in neighborhoods where police activity is relatively limited may interpret the incarceration of a neighbor as a largely individual phenomenon … In the neighborhoods where policing is most prevalent — often, lower-income Black communities — the incarceration of a neighbor might not be interpreted so individualistically. It may, rather, be interpreted as another reminder of the government’s unfairness. If a would-be voter finds herself soured on political participation because of her neighbor’s incarceration, she may be less likely to cast a ballot.”

Restoring Voting Rights: Evidence that Reversing Felony Disenfranchisement Increases Political Efficacy
Victoria Shineman. Policy Studies, December 2019.

The study: Shineman explores what happens to the political efficacy of people who have been convicted of felonies and disenfranchised after their right to vote is then restored or made eligible to be restored. Political efficacy refers to “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process,” according to foundational political science research from the mid-1950s.

Shineman conducted a survey of people with felony convictions eligible to have their voting rights restored, before and after the 2017 statewide elections in Virginia. In 2016, an executive gubernatorial order and subsequent court ruling allowed people convicted of felonies in Virginia to have their voting rights restored, one at a time, by executive order. By the 2017 election, more than 150,000 people had their right to vote restored, according to the paper.

Those who had their voting rights restored were notified by mail at their last known residence. But people convicted of felonies are “a particularly transient population,” Shineman writes, meaning many of those now able to vote did not know it.

Shineman convened a panel of 98 people convicted of felonies, divided into three groups, to assess their political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle. The first group was told the state sought to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies, and Shineman offered to look up their registration status. The second group received the same treatment, plus they were told about the upcoming election, how to register and where to vote. The third was a placebo group that was encouraged to engage in civic activity by volunteering in their neighborhoods, but not told that they could potentially register to vote, or about the election. Participants were surveyed about their feelings of political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle.

The findings: Among participants in the first two groups, about 21% learned from Shineman that their right to vote had been restored. Shineman notes that the sample size is small, which somewhat limits the strength of the results. With that caveat in mind, the treatment groups exhibited higher rates of political efficacy than the placebo group. For example, about 90% of people in those groups agreed with the statement “my vote makes a difference,” compared with 73% in the placebo group. Some 81% of participants in the treatment groups said they felt qualified to serve in a jury, compared with 76% of those in the placebo group. And 68% of the treatment participants said they “feel politically empowered,” compared with 57% of the placebo group.

In the author’s words: “Regardless as to whether citizens choose to exercise their voting rights, the act of restoring rights alone causes citizens to feel more empowered, more capable, and to be more likely to seek out opportunities for participatory engagement in the future.”

Suggested story ideas and interview questions

• When telling the stories of people affected by felony disenfranchisement, including family members and community members, delve into the consequences of losing the right to vote. Try to move from abstract (“losing the right to vote”) to concrete effects, such as financial, physical health and mental health outcomes.
• If there are local conflicts between people advocating for and against felony disenfranchisement, use research to inform or question each side’s arguments.
• Use census data and information from organizations like The Sentencing Project to report local or statewide demographic differences in felony disenfranchisement. Who is the practice disproportionately affecting?

The post Felony disenfranchisement in the US: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Major public health and medical associations in the U.S., including the American College of Physicians, American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association have recognized voting as a social determinant of health and have called for equitable access to voting, including for people with disabilities.

A growing body of research shows that voting and health are intertwined. People affected by poor health or disabilities are less likely to cast a ballot than the general population, and as a result, have less sway over who gets to be in power and what policies are made.

When previously disenfranchised people, including people with disabilities, vote, policies that benefit everyone and better health outcomes follow, according to County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a program of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

About 42.5 million Americans have disabilities, according to 2021 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. A disability is any condition of the body or mind that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or interact with the world around them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the November 2020 election, individuals with disabilities voted at a 7% lower rate than people without disabilities, according to the Disability and Voting Accessibility in the 2020 Elections survey by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and Rutgers University. More than 11% — nearly 2 million people with disabilities — said they faced difficulties voting.

Voters with disabilities face a range of barriers, including inaccessible voting places, lack of accessible voting machines, and state laws that restrict voting by mail or criminalize assisting a person in voting, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

When the Government Accountability Office officials visited 167 polling places during the 2016 general election, only 17% were fully accessible for people with disabilities who wanted to vote in person. The most common barriers were steep ramps, lack of signs for accessible paths to the building, gravel parking lots or lack of parking options.

In 2023, at least 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws, which will take effect for the 2024 general election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute at New York University. Most of the laws limit mail-in voting, shorten the window of requesting a mail ballot or ban drop boxes. Even though these laws don’t target people with disabilities, they create additional barriers for them.

People who live in institutions like nursing homes, those who are under legal guardianship and people with mental illness are also less likely to vote than the general population, research has shown. In some cases, these people are prohibited from voting by state law.

Several states bar individuals under guardianship or conservatorship from voting, according to a 2022 study published in the Election Law Journal.

“Out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, 35 have constitutional provisions that specifically do not allow mentally incapacitated individuals to vote and thirteen state constitutions are silent on whether an individual with limited capacity can vote. Most states require a court order to disenfranchise individuals with limited capacity either as part of the appointment of a limited guardianship or as part of the voter registration process,” according to a 2022 explainer by the American Bar Association.

Although federal elections are mainly conducted under state laws and policies, several federal laws specifically address accessibility issues for voters with disabilities in states and counties, according to a 2021 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Those provisions are included in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which sets guidelines for counties and states, has a dedicated page for voting accessibility. And those guidelines can be enforced by the Department of Justice.

Below, we have gathered four studies that examine the relationship between voting in the U.S. and disabilities. The research roundup is followed by several story ideas and interview questions for journalists.

The findings show…

• People with disabilities are less likely to vote than people without disabilities and state laws that restrict voting further limit their ability to vote.
• Voting rates vary depending on the type and level of disability. For instance, people with hearing disability tend to vote at a similar rate as the general population while the voting rate among people with mental disabilities has been shown to be 18% lower than the general population. Also, people with more functional limitations, including difficulty speaking and reading, were less likely to vote than people who didn’t have those challenges.
• Compliance with disability access laws at polling sites is under-enforced. There is no national ADA certification or permitting process to ensure that voting locations are accessible.
• Some states have competency laws that prevent certain groups of people with disabilities from voting, such as people who have legal guardians, even though such arrangements might have nothing to do with the person’s ability to vote. In many states, only a judge may decide whether an individual shouldn’t have the ability to vote.
• People living in nursing homes and assisted living facilities are enthusiastic to vote but face numerous hurdles to cast a ballot.

Research roundup

Disenfranchisement and Voting Opportunity Among People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
Sarah Nelson Lineberry and Matthew Bogenschutz. Journal of the Society for Social Work & Research, Winter 2023.

The study: The paper examines predictors of voting among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities who received state-funded disability services in Virginia. The authors used data from the state’s 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 National Core Indicators In-Person Survey — a collaborative project of the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disability Services and the Human Service Research Institute. The sample included 1,620 people.

The findings: People with more severe intellectual and developmental disabilities, those with guardians, and those who have not attended advocacy events are less likely to vote than their peers, the study finds. Having a key to one’s home and being able to lock one’s bedroom door were associated with an increased likelihood of voting. Social workers have the opportunity to help increase voting opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, the authors write.

In the authors’ words: “Results suggest that people with severe or profound levels of [intellectual and developmental disabilities] have a particularly limited voice in American democracy, which should serve as a call to action for advocates to do more to ensure that voting opportunity the most fundamental of democratic rights — is accessible to all people.”

Also: Voting Rights for Persons with Serious Mental Illnesses in the U.S., published in 2019 in the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal provides a detailed overview of the issues.

Defending Voting Rights in Long-Term Care Institutions
Nina A. Kohn and Casey Smith. Boston University Law Review, 2023.

The study: Nearly 2.2 million Americans live in long-term care facilities in the U.S., including nursing homes and assisted living facilities. There’s a growing consensus among scholars and policymakers that “a person has the cognitive capacity to vote so long as they can somehow express a voting choice,” the authors write. And contrary to common assumptions, most long-term care residents don’t have substantial cognitive disabilities. Researchers reviewed nursing home inspection reports from 2016 to 2021 to better understand barriers to voting.

The findings: The authors’ review of nursing home inspection reports finds evidence that residents are enthusiastic about voting. But they identified more than 100 documented instances of nursing homes violating residents’ voting rights. Long-term care residents face systemic disenfranchisement, including “burdensome election procedures, profound isolation, and widespread failure by facilities to provide required assistance prevent long-term care residents from voting,” they write.

In the authors’ words: “Indeed, even a few, targeted cases defending the voting rights of long-term care residents could undermine the harmful assumption that this population does not have the ability to vote and that their voting rights are — as some states suggested amid the COVID-19 pandemic — ‘non-essential.’”

Designing Accessible Elections: Recommendations from Disability Voting Rights Advocates
Ihaab Syed, et al. Election Law Journal, March 2022.

The study: The article analyzes some of the main reasons why barriers to voting for people with disabilities persist and offers insights into how local and state election officials can improve election policies, practices and procedures.

The findings: One of the main reasons for voting inaccessibility is a complex and decentralized system of administering elections. Laws are under-enforced and there’s a failure to ask for the perspective, preferences and needs of people with disabilities. Most states don’t have a deadline for counties to designate polling places, let alone require an audit of the site for accessibility. The DOJ, which has the authority to issue regulations and litigate actions, has not been very active, researchers write. Also, policymakers must account for the fact that some people with disabilities will prefer or need to receive in-person assistance, and electoral policies must not interfere with their ability to get assistance from the person of their choice, they write.

In the authors’ words: “In closing, we urge election officials (and policymakers at all levels of government) to take seriously a slogan that has become a powerful rallying cry in the disability rights movement: ‘Nothing about us without us.’”

Disability and Voting Accessibility in the 2020 Elections: Final Report on Survey Results Submitted to the Election Assistance Commission
Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse. February 2021.

The study: This paper is based on a nationally representative survey of 2,569 U.S. participants: 1,782 with disabilities and 787 without disabilities. The survey was conducted by SSRS, a well-established survey firm.

The findings: The 52-page report is filled with data, but here are some highlights.

• People with disabilities are more likely to be older and non-married, less likely to have high school or college degrees, and less likely to be Hispanic or Latino, compared with people without disabilities.
• The incidence of voting difficulties for people with disabilities dropped markedly, from 26.1% in 2012 to 11.4% in 2020. However, the overall rate of difficulties for voters with disabilities in 2020 was almost twice the rate for voters without disabilities (11% compared to 6%).
• 30% of people with cognitive impairment and 24% of people with vision impairment reported difficulty in voting at a polling place, compared with 9.8% of people without a disability.
• Mobility limitations were most common (48%) among people with disabilities, followed by cognitive (24%), hearing (18%), and vision (12%) impairments. (Some respondents fell into more than one category.)
• 49% of people with disabilities voted at a polling place or election office in 2020, compared with 56% of voters without disabilities.
• 55% of people with disabilities, including those with mobility limitations and those needing help with daily activities used mail ballots, compared with 44% of voters without disabilities.
• 74% of people with disabilities used early voting and voting by mail, compared with 69% of voters without disabilities.
• 53% of people with disabilities said they follow politics most of the time, compared with 42% of people without disabilities.

In the authors’ words: “The results show significant progress has been made in voting accessibility since 2012. This reflects well on the efforts of the EAC, election officials, policy-makers, and disability organizations. Nevertheless, voters with disabilities remain significantly more likely than those without disabilities to experience voting difficulties, indicating that more work needs to be done to improve accessibility.”

Also: The authors conducted another survey during the November 2022 elections, finding comparable results to 2020 but better accessibility than in 2012.

Disability and Election Administration in the United States: Barriers and Improvements
April A. Johnson and Sierra Powell. Policy Studies, November 2019.

The study: The authors examine whether lower voter turnout among people with disabilities is directly related to voting procedures, including voter registration, voter identification regulations and methods of ballot submission. They analyzed data from the 2012 and 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a survey of more than 50,000 Americans conducted by polling firm YouGov before and after presidential and midterm elections.

The findings: Overall, 30% of people with disabilities in 2016, and 37% of people with disabilities in 2012 specifically cited “disability or illness” as the main reason why they did not vote. Registering oneself to vote was a substantial barrier for people with disabilities. Also, voting by mail, instead of early voting or same-day registration, may be more inclusive for people with disabilities.

In the authors’ words: “One of the most disturbing discoveries presented here is that election administration also affects one’s psychological state. Electoral systems which impose or magnify perceptions of intimidation at the polls among any group of persons should garner both serious attention and pointed remedies,” the authors write. “We agree and believe that poll workers may benefit from more specialized training, specifically with regard to accommodations for those with cognitive, physical, or emotional limitations. Such administrative efforts may serve to reduce the ‘chilling effect’ of perceived hostile voting conditions.”

Suggested story ideas and interview questions

• Are your area’s polling places accessible to people with disabilities? To start, read GAO’s 2021 and 2017 reports to understand barriers, laws and solutions. The U.S. Department of Justice has an accessibility checklist for polling places. Also, the National Institute of Standards and Technology within the Department of Commerce examines technological barriers to the voting process for people with disabilities.
• Ask your local election officials how they are making voting places more accessible to people with disabilities. Do they have data on what percentage of polling places are fully accessible and how that rate has changed over time?
• Speak with advocacy groups and disability rights activists about barriers to voting in your state and county.
• What barriers do people in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other institutions face in voting in your state or county? The National Disability Rights Network has a helpful explainer to get you started.
• What are your state’s voting laws for people under guardianship? Start with this 2022 explainer from the American Bar Association and this 2023 report by the National Disability Rights Network. This 2018 guide for voters with mental disabilities by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law also explains the basics.
• Are your area nursing homes assisting their residents who want to vote? You may be able to find past violations in nursing home inspection reports.
• Also, don’t forget to use proper style. The National Center on Disability and Journalism has a language style guide. The Arc, an advocacy organization for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities has a Journalist’s Guide to Disability for Election 2024.

The post Barriers to voting for people with disabilities: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

We updated this piece on ballot measures, originally published in October 2022, to include new figures, two recent research studies and other information.

When U.S. voters go to the polls in November, many will face two types of decisions: Selecting elected officials and choosing whether to support or reject individual ballot measures.

In most states, voters get a direct say in how they are governed by voting on ballot measures — proposals to enact or repeal certain laws or policies, or amend a state constitution.

In 2023, voters in eight states will decide on a total of 41 ballot measures addressing a range of policy topics, including marijuana legalization, abortion, farming and property tax exemptions, according to Ballotpedia, a nonprofit organization that tracks election and policy issues across the U.S.

This year, as in prior years, advocacy groups will spend tons of money trying to persuade voters to say “yes” or “no” to changes that can have a substantial impact on the everyday lives of people who work, live or attend school in a particular state, county or city. As of Sept. 18, campaigns promoting and opposing Ohio Issue 1, an abortion-related ballot question, had raised $27.1 million to fund their efforts, Ballotpedia reports.

But many factors beyond campaign ads and fiery policy debates can influence voters’ choices. It’s important for journalists covering ballot measures, also called ballot propositions, to understand which factors can push voters in one direction over another and why.

To help, we’ve gathered and summarized academic studies that investigate these issues. Their findings suggest:

• When voters enter their polling place, many will not know much, if anything, about the ballot measures they encounter.
• The way ballot questions are worded and framed affects how voters respond to them.
• If ballots are lengthy or ballot measures appear near the bottom, some voters will not vote on ballot measures.
• There’s a link between the types of students who attend local public schools and the level of support voters give tax referendums for public schools.
• It’s easier to persuade voters to choose “no.”
• Local newspapers play a key role in helping voters decide on ballot measures and getting them to finish filling out their ballots. 

Keep reading to learn more. We plan to add studies to this list as new ones become available.

It’s important to note that scholars, government officials and others use several terms to refer to proposals placed on ballots for voters’ approval or rejection. “Ballot measure” is an umbrella term that applies to all types of ballot proposals. The Initiative & Referendum Institute, housed at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, discusses the various terms in this brief explainer.

It’s also worth pointing out that voters typically vote “yes” or “no” on ballot measures. Sometimes, though, they are offered more than two choices. For example, a voter might be prompted to decide between two proposed laws or pick “neither,” according to John Matsusaka, executive director of the Initiative & Referendum Institute.

Influencing voter choices

Predicting Vote Choice and Election Outcomes from Ballot Wording: The Role of Processing Fluency in Low Information Direct Democracy Elections
Hillary C. Shulman; et al. Political Communication, June 2022.

When voters have little to no information about a ballot initiative, they’re more likely to say “yes” when it’s written in simple, easy-to-understand language, this study of 240 registered voters in Ohio indicates. Likewise, when voters have difficulty understanding a ballot question written with uncommon words and jargon, they tend to vote “no” — or not vote at all.

In this paper, researchers focus specifically on what they call “low salience” ballot initiatives, those that received little news coverage and for which no campaign fundraising was done. They conducted two experiments in which participants sat in a quiet room with a computer, which they used to read and vote on ballot initiatives taken from actual ballots in previous elections in other states.

In the first experiment, participants read and voted on 40 ballot initiatives from 21 states. To try to replicate their results, they conducted a second experiment using different ballots — 24 from 11 states.

The researchers write that the results of both experiments provide “support for the notion that ballots written with more frequently used words (i.e., easier) compelled an easier experience that led to a higher likelihood of ballot support.”

They note that when they compared participants’ votes with real-life votes on the ballot measures, they saw similar patterns. Of the 40 ballot measures tested in the first part of the study, 85% passed in both the experimental “election” and the real-world election. Meanwhile, 87.5% of the 24 ballots used in the second experiment were approved in both.

School Characteristics and Voting: What Matters in Turnout and Passage
Karin E. Kitchens. Urban Affairs Review, August 2022.

In Florida, there’s a link between the types of students who attend local public schools and the level of support voters give tax referendums aimed at raising money for public schools, according to this study.

“The percent of students who pass third-grade math in a [voting] precinct is associated with higher passage rates,” the author writes.

During primary elections specifically, voters are less likely to say “yes” to tax referendums in communities where a larger proportion of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school.

To better understand the factors that influence voter support for tax referendums for schools, the author analyzed a variety of data on elections, registered voters, and public and private schools in Florida from 2008 to 2018. During that time, public school districts asked voters 125 times for permission to either raise local tax rates or introduce new taxes to generate more funding for public schools. Ninety-five referendums passed.

The author learned that voter demographics also affect the odds someone will support or reject a referendum. For example, referendums received less support in communities with a lot of older voters or voters who own their homes.

“Because the majority of tax referendum votes are for property tax increases, this shows that the people that are most likely to be affected by the tax increase are less likely to support it,” she writes. “However, the higher household median income is associated with an increase in the percent yes vote.”

Ballot Initiatives and Status Quo Bias
Joshua J. Dyck and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, January 2021.

It’s easier to encourage voters to vote “no” than “yes” on ballot initiatives, this study suggests.

The researchers used two survey experiments to test the effectiveness of arguments made by campaigns urging voters to either support or reject certain ballot initiatives. For the first experiment, researchers conducted telephone surveys with 956 Massachusetts voters one week before the 2012 general election to ask them about three ballot initiatives they would be voting on. For the second experiment, conducted in May 2013, researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. adults about three hypothetical ballot initiatives.

Participants considered a total of six issues: second trimester abortions, medical use of marijuana, sex offender residency restrictions, assisted suicide, automotive repair laws and a supermajority state budget requirement.

In both experiments, participants were divided into three groups, each of which answered questions about three ballot initiatives. One group was cued with a short argument in favor of the ballot initiative. One was cued with a short argument in opposition to the initiative. Members of the third group — the control group — received no cues and were simply asked if they would support or oppose the measure.

The researchers discovered that cues against a measure were more effective than cues in favor of a measure. For example, U.S. adults cued to oppose a ballot question on second trimester abortion were 9.8% more likely to oppose the measure than adults in the control group. Meanwhile, U.S. adults cued to support the ballot question were less than 1% more likely to say “yes” to it than adults in the control group.

The results indicate opposition cues are most effective at moving people to oppose issues that require relatively high levels of political sophistication, education or effort to understand – for example, whether a supermajority of legislators should be required to make budgetary changes. U.S. adults cued to oppose a hypothetical ballot question about that issue were 20.2% more likely to say they would vote “no” than were members of the control group.

“Across all six issues and in both surveys, opposition cues decrease support for ballot measures from about 9 to 24 percentage points,” the authors write.

Extra, Extra, (Don’t) Roll-off about It! Newspaper Endorsements for Ballot Measures
Kevin Fahey, Carol S. Weissert and Matthew J. Uttermark. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, March 2018.

This 20-year study of ballot measures in Florida finds a link between local newspaper endorsements of specific ballot measure and a lower percentage of voters saying “no” to them.

Researchers collected county-level data on voting decisions on the 79 state constitutional amendments that appeared on general election ballots in Florida between 1994 and 2014. They also looked at whether and how newspapers in different parts of the state encouraged audiences to vote on each ballot measure.

The authors of the paper find that newspaper endorsements are associated with a 4.4% decline in “no” votes. Even a small reduction can make a big difference in Florida elections.

“As the average amendment receives 58% of the vote, an endorsement can be critical in helping push the amendment over the 60% requirement for passage,” the authors explain.

Voter Experience and Ballot Language Framing Effects: Evidence from a Survey Experiment
Ted D. Rossier. Social Science Quarterly, November 2021.

This small study demonstrates that the way ballot measures are worded and framed can affect how voters respond to them.

In an online experiment, 502 adults eligible to vote in the U.S. read hypothetical ballot measures and then indicated whether they would support them. The researcher recruited participants using Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace many scholars use to find people for surveys and studies.

For the first part of the experiment, conducted in November 2016, each participant read one of two versions of a ballot measure calling for a tax increase to fund public education. People were almost twice as likely to support the increase when it was described as an additional “one cent per dollar” than when it was described as “a 22 percent increase,” the author of the paper found. The first version drew support from 60% of participants who read it. One-third of those who read the second version said they would vote for it.

For the second part of the experiment, participants read two hypothetical ballot measures on issues related to public money or property being used for the benefit of religion or religious organizations. The key difference: One measure focused on the removal of something — a Ten Commandments monument from the State Capitol — while the other called for something to be provided — tuition vouchers that low-income students could use to attend private, religious schools.

Participants were more likely to support the measure on school tuition vouchers — 43% of those who read it supported it. Meanwhile, 38% of adults who read the other measure said they would vote “yes.”

The author notes how important it is for authorities to understand how the language and framing of ballot measures can be used to draw or discourage support.

“As a general matter, state institutions that are responsible for writing ballot questions, as well as the courts that hear challenges thereto, must remain mindful of the potential for nefarious manipulation of the process,” he writes.

What voters know about ballot initiatives

Direct Democracy, Educative Effects, and the (Mis)Measurement of Ballot Measure Awareness
Jay Barth, Craig M. Burnett and Janine Parry. Political Behavior, 2020.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether traditional methods of measuring voters’ knowledge of ballot measures — primarily asking them “yes” or “no” questions — have been accurate. The researchers conclude these methods vastly overestimate voter knowledge.

They found most Arkansas voters who participated in survey experiments during two election years could not demonstrate familiarity with any of the ballot measures they would be voting on — even though the election was days away and some measures addressed high-profile issues such as gambling and increasing the minimum wage.

“Indeed, the results of our simple experiments suggest that only about 1 in 4 voters is conscious of even one measure on an upcoming ballot,” the researchers write.

Researchers conducted two statewide surveys of Arkansas voters in 2014 and 2016, one or two weeks before November elections. To gauge how familiar voters were with the ballot measures that would be coming before them, live callers conducted phone interviews with more than 1,500 adults, 75% of whom said they were “very likely” to participate in the upcoming election.

Half of participants were interviewed before Arkansas’s 2014 general election, which included five ballot questions. Half were interviewed prior to the 2016 general election, when Arkansas voters decided four ballot questions.

Among the key findings:

• In 2014, 54% of survey participants said they were unaware any measure would be on the ballot for the upcoming election. In 2016, 53% did not expect ballot measures.
• Half the people who knew ballot measures would appear on their ballots could not identify any of the issues.
• The voters most likely to overstate their level of knowledge about ballot measures were well educated, say they closely follow government and politics, and show a high level of knowledge about federal governance.

The researchers explain why they think earlier methods of measuring voter knowledge failed to accurately capture voter knowledge of ballot measures.

“We suspect that when asked by past researchers if they had ‘read or heard about Proposition X,’ most voters said ‘yes’ not because a robust policy discussion brought the matter to their attention, but because affectively ‘yes’ is the correct answer,” they write.

Insights on why voters skip parts of their ballot

Ballot Position, Choice Fatigue, and Voter Behaviour
Ned Augenblick and Scott Nicholson. The Review of Economic Studies, April 2016.

If ballot measures had appeared at the top of election ballots in San Diego County, California instead of at the bottom, 24 measures that failed between 1992 and 2002 would have passed, according to this analysis. Ballot measures, called propositions in California, appeared below 27 other items, on average.

Researchers examined voter behavior across San Diego County for all primary and general elections during that period. They chose that region because ballot positioning varied considerably among voting precincts thanks to differences in the number of local, state and federal political races and local and state ballot measures.

They found voters often did not finish long ballots, with many skipping races and measures appearing at the bottom.

“We find that voters are more likely to abstain and more likely to rely on decision shortcuts, such as voting for the status quo or the first candidate listed in a race, as the ballot position of a contest falls,” the authors write.

The share of voters who said “no” to ballot measures would have been 3.2 percentage points lower, on average, if the measures had appeared at the top of ballots, they conclude.

“Therefore, given the ballot position of each proposition, we calculate that 24 (6%) of the propositions in our data set would have passed rather than failed if voters did not experience choice fatigue,” they write.

Local newspapers and voter behavior

Newspapers and Political Participation: The Relationship Between Ballot Rolloff and Local Newspaper Circulation
Christopher Chapp and Peter Aehl. Newspaper Research Journal, May 2021.

This study suggests voters living in U.S. communities with a local newspaper complete a greater portion of their ballots. When researchers examined nationwide voting patterns, they discovered that in areas where the per capita newspaper circulation rate was higher, a larger percentage of voters voted in both the presidential race, located at the top of the ballot, and state legislative races, which are located farther down the ballot.

For the analysis, researchers merged data on the circulation and location of 8,000 local newspapers with results from the 2016 general election aggregated by legislative district.

They found people completed more of their ballots in areas with higher circulation rates, regardless of whether the newspaper published daily or weekly. They found the relationship to be particularly acute in areas where legislative races were less competitive, “suggesting that local news is an especially valuable information source when campaign activity is less pronounced.”

Additional resources

• Initiative & Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California studies ballot measures. It also maintains several databases of ballot measures. To access the data, contact the institute’s executive director, John Matsusaka.
• The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a Statewide Ballot Measures Database, searchable by state, topic, keyword, year, status or primary sponsor.
• Ballotpedia provides a variety of information on ballot measure trends and individual ballot measures, including campaign fundraising totals, ballot readability scores and links to analyses and polls conducted on individual measures.
• The nonprofit research organization OpenSecrets tracks fundraising by campaigns supporting or opposing statewide ballot measures.

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During the 2020 presidential election, national and local news outlets highlighted the critical role election officials play in administering impartial voting in the U.S. 

With the 2022 midterms on the horizon, local election officials should once again be in the spotlight leading up to Election Day, on Nov. 8. Since 2020, former President Donald Trump has endorsed numerous candidates running for election posts around the country, including powerful jobs such as secretary of state.

Historically, former presidents have not endorsed candidates in state or local races for election offices. In the U.S., the federal government sets election laws that broadly protect voting rights and specify election crimes, though the Supreme Court in recent years has sided with states seeking to weaken voting rights.

Decades ago, the job of a local election official was apolitical and somewhat perfunctory.

“In 1976, the job of the local election official was widely viewed as clerical, requiring no particular education or training,” writes Ernest Hawkins in a 2008 Public Administration Review commentary on how his job as a top election official in Sacramento County changed over 30 years. “Most [local election officials] were, and still are, elected, and many of them combine elections with other duties, as in the case of county clerks.”

Local election officials work for a county, city or town. They hold a range of titles, which may include “county clerk, county commissioner, registrar, director of elections, or probate judge,” according to a September 2021 report from the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School. (The Journalist’s Resource is also housed at the Kennedy School, in the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.)

Election officials in heavily populated cities bear a large responsibility for administering successful elections. In 2004, for example, “local election officials responsible for administering elections in just 4% of jurisdictions covered almost 64% of American voters,” according to the Ash Center report. Poll workers, who direct voters on where and how to vote at a voting site, are usually volunteers from the nearby community. Sometimes they are paid a nominal sum — $50 to $135 for an 18-hour work day — according to one of the papers featured below.

The work that local election officials do has become more dangerous since the 2020 presidential election, according to a July 2022 report by the Benenson Strategy Group and the Brennan Center for Justice, commissioned by the National League of Cities.

Based on a 2022 survey of 596 local election officials around the country, the report finds that “64% of local election officials believe that false information about elections is making their jobs more dangerous, and 95% place blame on social media. Most say that social media companies have not done enough to stop the spread of false information.”

To help bolster journalists’ election reporting, we’ve gathered recent research on the role that elections officials and poll workers play in making voting run smoothly.

Here are the questions the research seeks to answer:

• Why do some counties have more poll workers and voting places per eligible voter than others on Election Day?
• What are the most effective communication methods to encourage voter registration?
• How do various voter registration methods affect the likelihood that people’s applications will be rejected?
• Does allowing poll workers to work statewide, instead of just the precinct where they are registered, help election officials ease staffing pressures?
• Do local election officials show bias in helping voters from particular racial or ethnic groups navigate the polling process?

Determinants of Local Election Resource Distribution Nationwide
Joseph Coll. Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics and Policy, September 2022.

The study: Using federal survey data on polling sites and poll workers in all 50 U.S. states taken after national elections held 2012 to 2018, Coll explores several questions: Do richer counties have more polling sites and poll workers? What about counties with high historical turnout and large populations, or those that have predominately minority populations? Do counties with a top election official who is Republican provide fewer polling sites and poll workers than those headed by a Democrat? Or are voting resources more closely linked to whether a majority of a county’s voters are from the same party as the top election official?

The findings: Voting resources are most strongly linked to voting demand, Coll finds. Counties with large populations and relatively high turnout — indicating a high demand for voting — have more polling sites and workers per 1,000 voting-age individuals. “Additionally, counties in states with early voting also employ more poll workers,” Coll finds. The median income of a county is not linked to voting resources. Counties with a Republican top election official tend to offer fewer voting sites as the county trends over time to favor Republican candidates — the opposite is true in counties with a Democrat top official where votes trend Republican. Coll suggests that as the Republican vote in a county becomes “locked” — when voters in the county reliably vote for Republican candidates — Republican election officials may be less inclined to provide voting sites and workers.

The author writes: “Contrary to research from specific states and counties, this study does not find an anti-non-white bias to election administration resource distribution nationwide. However, these findings do not necessarily invalidate state or county-specific evidence, rather, they suggest there may be idiosyncratic influences in certain locations.”

Can Electoral Management Bodies Expand the Pool of Registered Voters? Examining the Effects of Face-to-Face, Remote, Traditional, and Social Media Outreach
Thessalia Merivaki and Mara Suttmann-Lea. Policy Studies, March 2022.

The study: This study focuses on Florida, where, by state law, election officials in all 67 Florida counties have to administer a voter education survey after federal elections. Among other topics, the survey asks where voters engaged with voter education efforts — at high schools, through print and social media, and other venues. The authors analyzed survey results from 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018, along with detailed data on voter education posts from local officials on Facebook, in order to assess what works when it comes to increasing voter registration.

The findings: From 2014 to 2018, face-to-face outreach, such as educational sessions with community groups, were associated with increased voter registration rates. Newspaper ads were also good at getting people to sign up to vote, “consistent with experimental evidence that individuals who read newspapers are more likely to vote,” the authors write. Facebook posts from 2020 related to voter education were also associated with more use of Florida’s online voter registration system, indicating a positive response from “prospective and existing voters, who may not have otherwise been exposed to this information during the pandemic.” (Florida voters can also use the online portal to edit personal information, such as their address.) Home mailings were less effective, but the authors note the survey data does not allow them to parse whether specific types of mailings are more or less helpful in encouraging registrations. 

The authors write: “Election officials in countries like the Bahamas, Belize, Burundi, and Mexico, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, which also place the burden of registration largely on individuals, may look to some of the tools we assess. And even among countries where the burden of registration lies more heavily on the government, voters may still be required to take additional steps to successfully register to vote.”

Access Denied? Investigating Voter Registration Rejections in Florida
Thessalia Merivaki. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, January 2021.

The study: In another Florida-centric paper, Merivaki explores how the process of registering affects registration rates across the state. Applications are rejected mostly due to missing or incomplete address information, Merivaki writes. Prospective voters can register in every state in a variety of ways, including at motor vehicle department offices, through mail-in applications, and at community registration drives. Merivaki examines whether particular registration methods are associated with higher rates of application approvals across the 67 counties in Florida during 2012.

The findings: Registration at motor vehicle offices and in-person at an elections office did not affect the likelihood a voter form would be rejected. For every 10% increase in a county’s rate of mail-in registrations, rejections dropped by about 2%, Merivaki finds. Similarly, every 10% increase in applications submitted through a registration drive is associated with a rejection decrease of about 1%. And every 10% increase in applications at public agencies, like libraries, is associated with a nearly 5% drop in rejections. Registrations submitted closer to the October 10 general election registration cutoff date were not more likely to be rejected — in fact, rejection rates were higher more than three months out from the deadline. Merivaki suggests that closer to the deadline voters may be more personally invested in the election and more likely to pay attention and make sure their application is filled out correctly. But there is less margin to correct errors when prospective voters submit applications closer to the deadline.

The author writes: “As the evidence from Pinellas County suggest, even though most voters submitted complete and valid voter registration applications between October 1 and 9, 2012, many of those who did not were eligible citizens who essentially did not have the time to correct any missing information, and therefore would not have been able to cast a valid vote in the 2012 Presidential Election.”

Portable Poll Workers: Eliminating Precinct Requirements in U.S. Elections
Joshua Hostetter. Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics and Policy, September 2020.

The study: Hostetter analyzes federal election survey data from 2008 to 2018 to assess whether allowing voters to volunteer or work as poll workers anywhere in the state where they are registered — not just their own precinct or county — improves access to poll workers for election officials. Alaska, California, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia are the only states where registered voters can work in any precinct across their state, according to Hostetter. He adds: “I expect that, by not restricting the geographical location poll workers can work, these six states can send poll workers to precincts around the state to work the polls.”

The findings: After federal elections, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission survey asks every county election administrator whether it was difficult or easy for them to get the poll workers they needed for the most recent election. Hostetter analyzes presidential and midterm election years separately, since presidential elections usually result in higher turnout. He also controls for whether the state allows vote by mail, is rural, or has a large older population, since older Americans are more likely to be poll workers. Hostetter finds in order for local election officials to have an easier time recruiting enough poll workers to meet local voting demand, their state needs to allow poll workers to move statewide, not just at the county or precinct level.

The author writes: “The results highlight the importance of simplifying the poll-worker voter registration requirements. Further, increasing the pool of potential poll workers may help address the underlying problem of poll worker quality. Since many [local election officials] do not have the luxury to turn away poll worker volunteers because of the worker shortages they currently face, by simply having a larger pool of volunteers it may allow [local election officials] to differentiate between lower- and higher-qualified workers.”

Persistent Bias Among Local Election Officials
D. Alex Hughes, et. al. Journal of Experimental Political Science, August 2019.

The study: The authors explore whether local election officials exhibit racial or ethnic bias in how they interact with voters. They sent an email to 6,235 local election officials across 44 states in late October 2016, asking for information on state voting requirements and with each email following the same basic structure. The main difference was each was signed with a different male name commonly associated with a particular race or ethnicity, according to U.S. Census data and other sources. The authors used male names because they were interested in parsing whether race or ethnicity, not gender, played a role in responses from local election officials. “The two primary motivations for this study are to determine whether the previous finding of bias toward Latinos stands up to replication and to examine whether this bias extends to blacks and Arab/Muslim Americans,” the authors write. As a few examples of the names used, the authors associate “Daniel Nash” as likely being the name of a white man. “Jose Valdez” is an example of a Latino name, “Terrell Turner” a Black name and “Baqir Ali” an Arab American name.

The findings: About 58% of all emails received a reply during the week leading up to Election Day. Emails from senders with white-sounding names garnered a 61% response rate, compared with 57% for all of those sent with Black-, Latino- and Arab American-sounding names. But response rates for white and Black senders were even at 61%. Latino senders received a response 58% of the time, with Arab American senders receiving a 50% response rate.

The authors write: “One key innovation in this experiment permits the identification of whether e-mails were received and opened by election officials. We include a 1 × 1 pixel image with a unique link — commonly referred to as a tracking pixel — in the e-mail body, so that upon opening the e-mail, most e-mail clients loaded the image from our server and provided a positive record that the e-mail had been opened by a particular official.”

Further reading

Who Counts? A 50-state Look at How States are Shutting People Out of Our Democracy.
Center for Public Integrity.

NCSL Election Resources
National Conference of State Legislatures.

Understanding the Role of Local Election Officials: How Local Autonomy Shapes U.S. Election Administration
Hannah Furstenberg-Beckman, Greg Degan and Tova Wang. Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School.

Voting Laws Roundup
Brennan Center for Justice.

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When the Bill of Rights was proposed, it was unthinkable that the right to vote would be included. That would have meant extending it to women, free Black people, and white people without property. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution gave the states the power to determine who could vote in federal elections.

That provision was subsequently modified by constitutional amendments, the 15^th and 19^th, that granted voting rights to newly freed Black people and women, respectively. However, as New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes noted in 1907 — 13 years before he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is …”

Judicial discretion allowed the Supreme Court during the Jim Crow era to uphold Southern laws that denied power to Black voters through devices such as literacy tests and whites-only primary elections. The Court privileged states’ authority under Article II over the 15^th Amendment’s guarantee of the right to vote.

The Supreme Court shifted its position in the 1960s when it upheld the 1965 Voting Rights Act as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to enforce the 15^th Amendment. The act authorized federal officials to go into states with a history of voter suppression to register eligible citizens and required these states to get clearance from the Justice Department before making any changes in their voting laws. For the first time in our nation’s history, nearly every U.S. citizen who wanted to vote could do so without facing an undue burden, such as passing a literacy test.

That era has ended. In the early 2000s, Republican legislators in Indiana and Georgia enacted laws requiring residents to have a government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license or passport, to register to vote. Minority group members, young adults, and people with low income — all of whom tend to vote Democratic — are the Americans least likely to have a passport or driver’s license.

The constitutionality of a government-issued photo ID law was challenged as violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. In 2008 the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision with Republican appointees casting the six votes, rejected the challenge, saying that, although the law had a partisan motive, it was only one of the motives behind the law. The Court’s decision gave a green light to other states to pass similar laws. Two dozen Republican-controlled states did so.

Five years later the Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), a 5-4 decision with all five of the majority votes cast by Republican appointees, the Supreme Court invalidated the requirement that required designated states to get clearance from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws, holding that the formula for identifying such states was obsolete.

The Court’s decision set off a race to the bottom in southern states. Within a year, every state previously subject to the preclearance requirement, all of which had a Republican-controlled legislature, had changed its voter eligibility rules.

Texas’s new law required voters to have an approved form of photo ID. On the approved list was a concealed handgun license. Omitted from the list was a state or local government employee ID. A college ID was also left off the list. Government workers, college faculty, staff, and students? Mostly Democrats. Gun owners? Mostly Republicans. The law was challenged as a violation of equal protection, but the Supreme Court upheld it in 2014.

In 2017, North Dakota’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law requiring residents to have a residential address to be eligible to vote. Nearly all white residents, who tend to vote Republican, had one. But many from North Dakota’s strongest Democratic voting bloc didn’t. They are the Native Americans living on reservations, which don’t have street names and numbers on all their roads. The Supreme Court allowed the North Dakota law to stand.

In 2021, the Republican appointed justices further weakened the Voting Rights Act by upholding a law enacted by Arizona’s Republican-controlled legislature that made it a crime for campaign workers and community volunteers to collect voters’ absentee or mail-in ballots and deliver them to a polling place or post office. The practice was concentrated on Arizona’s Native American reservations where polling places and post offices are often a long distance from people’s homes.

The Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices now appear set to assign the Voting Rights Act to history. In their new term, they have asked to hear a Voting Rights Act case challenging North Carolina’s new law that would block state courts from reviewing cases involving the rules for federal elections. The law if upheld could conceivably allow a state legislature to void election results and handpick the winner.

Texas, Georgia, and Florida are among the more than a dozen Republican-controlled states that have enacted more restrictive voting laws since the 2020 election, many of them aimed at suppressing Democratic turnout. A Georgia law, for example, restricts the number of Sundays on which early voting and registration can occur. Sunday was traditionally a time when Black congregations after church services would collectively register and vote. None of the voting laws enacted by Republican-controlled states since the 2020 election has been struck down by the Supreme Court.

The cumulative impact of states’ efforts to control access to the ballot will not be known until after the November votes are counted but it could be large enough to affect control of the House and Senate. Journalists might consider reminding their audience about what’s required to register and vote in their state.

Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government & the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School, is the founder of The Journalist’s Resource and author of several books, most recently “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?” JR plans to post a new installment of his Election Beat 2022 series every week leading up to the midterm elections. Patterson can be contacted at thomas_patterson@harvard.edu.

Further reading:

“Voting Laws Roundup: May 2022,” Brennan Center for Justice, NYU, 2022.

“Block the Vote: How Politicians are Trying to Block Voters from the Ballot Box,” ACLU, 2021.

“The Missing Right: A Constitutional Right to Vote,” Jonathan Soros, Democracy 28, Spring 2013.

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In most Western democracies, voter registration takes place automatically through the government. France is one of the few that, like the United States, require citizens to initiate their registration. But France has one thing the United States does not have, and it helps tardy citizens to remember to register in time — a uniform national registration date. News outlets throughout France highlight the pending closing of the registration rolls.

Registration deadlines in the U.S. are a patchwork of state deadlines. They come and go with little fanfare from election officials and not much more from the news media. Not surprisingly, research has found that few Americans know their state’s registration deadline, although the number jumps up in the states where it’s easiest to remember — those that allow residents to register at the polls on Election Day.

This year’s pitched partisan struggle over ballot access deserves the press’s attention. So, too, does the date on which states close their registration in advance of Election Day. States are prohibited by the 1993 National Voter Registration Act from closing their rolls sooner than 30 days before a federal election but are otherwise free to choose the date.

Officials in states with early closing dates say that it’s necessary because of the paperwork required. The claim made some sense in the age of paper. It makes no sense in the digital age. The dozen-and-a-half states that allow Election Day registration manage the process quite well.

Historically, early closing dates were designed in part to suppress the turnout of poor people, minorities and naturalized citizens. For a variety of reasons, including the more frequent change of residency, they were less likely to be on the voting rolls.

Voter suppression continues to underlie early closing dates in some states. States with the earliest closing dates tend also to be the states that otherwise make it harder for residents to vote — for example, by restricting early and mail-in voting.

Does it make a difference? Although other factors also need to be taken into account, states with early deadlines have voter turnout rates that are more than 10 percentage points lower on average than states that employ same-day registration.

A list of voter registration deadlines in the U.S.

The closing date in many states for voter registration is fast approaching. Here is a list of the states’ closing dates for in-person registration (which, in most cases, is also the deadline for postal and online registration):

Oct. 9              
Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas

Oct. 10            
Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Florida

Oct. 11            
Kentucky

Oct. 12            
Illinois, Missouri

Oct. 14            
North Carolina, Oklahoma

Oct. 15            
Delaware

Oct. 17            
Virginia

Oct. 18            
District of Columbia, Kansas, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, West Virginia

Oct. 19            
Massachusetts

Oct. 24            
Alabama, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota

Nov. 1             
Connecticut

Nov. 8  — Election Day            
California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

The news media have a role to play in ensuring that Americans get a chance to vote. They could do more to tell citizens when and how to register. Research indicates that large numbers of the unregistered are unaware of where to go to register, when registration offices reopen, or what they need to bring with them as proof of eligibility. If there’s space in the news for yet another poll on the midterms, space can be found to alert Americans to registration deadlines.

Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government & the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School, is the founder of The Journalist’s Resource and author of several books, most recently “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?” JR plans to post a new installment of his Election Beat 2022 series every week leading up to the midterm elections. Patterson can be contacted at thomas_patterson@harvard.edu.

Further reading:

Thomas E. Patterson. “The Vanishing Voter,” 2002.

Alex Street, Thomas A. Murray, John Blitzer and Rajan S. Patel. “Estimating Voter Registration Deadline Effects with Web Search Data,” Political Analysis, 2015.

Scot Schranfruagal, et al., “Cost of Voting in the American States: 2020,” Election Law Journal, 2020.

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Black people have lower voter registration rates in parts of the U.S. South where lynching occurred most often in the decades following the Civil War, according to forthcoming research in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

In Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, Black voter registration is nearly 3% lower in counties that rank in the top quartile for lynching rates from 1882 to 1930, compared with counties in the bottom quartile, finds the paper, “Historical Lynchings and the Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks.”

“Lynchings by definition are illegal killings — by definition, someone was killed illegally, period,” says author Jhacova Williams, an associate economist at the nonprofit policy think tank RAND Corp. “What [lynchings] taught someone’s great-great-great-grandfather was that whoever is supposed to protect you will not protect you. It taught, ‘I should not trust this system.’”

Williams notes that framework persists today: “When Black people see the killing of George Floyd, it is also a reminder of, ‘Yes, you are not connected. You are treated differently.’ So, because of that, ‘why would I vote?’”

Political motivations

Two years after the Civil War ended, Congress overrode a veto from President Andrew Johnson to pass the Reconstruction Act of 1867. The law required former Confederate states to provide universal voting rights for all men. Black men in the South voted for the first time, and Black politicians soon held large shares of legislative seats in South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida.

The Ku Klux Klan responded with systematic, violent intimidation of Black Americans, including lynchings specifically meant to deter voting, Williams finds. The klan killed more than 2,000 Black people in 1868 in Louisiana alone, according to the paper.

“It’s hard to get rid of that trauma, and it does span generation to generation,” Williams says.

Few, if any, of the thousands of lynchings carried out from 1882 to 1930 were criminally prosecuted, and past research has demonstrated lynchings suppressed Black voter turnout in the months leading to an election.

“We think of racial domination as social practices, like segregation and racial violence, being about intimidation in the social sphere,” says Ohio State University economics professor Trevon Logan, who was not involved in Williams’ analysis but provided feedback as she developed her research. “But there always has been a very pertinent political end to the story of racialized violence.”

Some states are restricting voting, others are expanding it

Williams’ paper reveals how violence from decades past affects current voting patterns at the same time states have passed or are considering laws to restrict voting.

In March, the Georgia legislature attracted news coverage when it passed a law making it harder to vote absentee. Georgia counties can now limit early voting on Sundays ahead of an election — a move critics contend targets “souls to the polls” get-out-the-vote efforts at Black churches. The law does require that counties hold two Saturday advance voting sessions for general elections.

Republican lawmakers in Ohio have proposed legislation that would restrict mail ballots for most voters there and ban drop box voting. At least 18 states have passed laws restricting voting this year, while 25 states have expanded voting access through mail ballots and other measures, according to a tally by the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

At the federal level, the House of Representatives last week passed voting rights legislation that would restore provisions the Supreme Court stripped in recent years from the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Most notably, the court in 2013 ruled that states could change their voting laws without federal approval. At the time of the ruling, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and select counties in other states were subject to federal oversight because of historical evidence of racial discrimination in voting access.

The lingering effects of violence from decades ago are “a huge factor, and why Black people in particular are not voting,” Williams says. “So now, when we add legislation to make it more difficult to vote, to me that is why it’s really important. Do we want to have a healthy electorate or not? When we have a healthy electorate, we have policies that represent everyone.”

Historical events ripple through time: A growing body of research

To conduct her analysis, Williams used data from the Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, which covers 1882 to 1930. She also used voter registration rolls from 2000 to 2012, and other academic and government data.

Williams focused on the historical lynching rate per 10,000 Black Americans during that roughly half century across 267 counties in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina. She analyzed those states because they ask voters to identify their race when registering.

“In a place like Lafayette County, Florida, there were eight lynchings during those years,” Williams explains in a 2020 video for the Economic Policy Institute, where she was an economist before joining RAND. “This means for every 1,000 Black people, one of them was lynched. Today, the Black voter registration rate is about 15% in that county. If those people hadn’t been killed, you would expect to see a Black voter registration rate of 55%.”

The relationship between historical lynchings and voter registration today that holds for Black voters doesn’t show for white voters.

“Further analyses suggest that this result is unlikely to be driven by education, earnings, incarceration rates of blacks, institutions that remained after slavery, geographic sorting, or contemporary barriers to voting,” Williams writes. Her forthcoming paper adds to a growing body of research investigating how violence and legislation from decades ago reverberates today.

Michigan State University economics and international relations professor Lisa Cook has found that violence in the decades after Reconstruction suppressed the patent output of Black inventors, writing that a “lynching signaled that personal security — and with it the freedom to work and innovate — was not guaranteed.”

Princeton University economics professor Ellora Derenoncourt, along with University of California, Berkeley economics professor Claire Montialoux, have shown how a minimum wage expansion in 1966 narrowed the earnings gap between Black and white workers throughout the 1970s.

Logan, the Ohio State professor, has linked higher taxes during Reconstruction — when the American South was decimated and needed funding to rebuild — with more violence against Black officeholders. Referring to Williams’ current work, Logan says: “This is not something I think a traditional economic historian would address. It speaks to the need to have diverse voices in the profession.”

Further reading

Confederate Streets and Black-White Labor Market Differentials
Jhacova Williams. American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, May 2021.

Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality
Ellora Derenoncourt and Clair Montialoux. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2021.

Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching
Lisa Cook, Trevon Logan and John Parman. Social Science History, July 2018.

Political Participation in a Violent Society: The Impact of Lynching on Voter Turnout in the post-Reconstruction South
Daniel Jones, Werner Troesken and Randall Walsh. Journal of Development Economics, November 2017.

Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870–1940
Lisa Cook. Journal of Economic Growth, May 2014.

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Lawsuits challenging changes to voting district maps often claim officials have moved district boundaries in a way that diminishes the political power of minority groups or unfairly gives one political party an edge. But new research that examines redistricting lawsuits across six decades surmises the real reason behind them might have less to do with correcting an unjust imbalance and more to do with pushing out the party in power.

Another key finding: While the news media frequently focus on redistricting cases in the U.S. South, which has a deep history of racial discrimination and suppressing Black residents’ voting rights, these lawsuits also are common in many northern states as well as California and Washington.

Every decade, following the federal census, states redraw the boundaries of their legislative and congressional districts to adjust for shifts in population, as required by the U.S. and state constitutions. Local governments also use new population data to determine the size, shape and location of voting districts for seats on governing bodies such as county councils and school boards.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Census Bureau provided states with data from the 2020 census. As officials review district maps and debate changes, researcher James G. Gimpel points out that redistricting disputes are most prevalent in so-called “purple” states, where voters support Republicans and Democrats at similar rates.

Litigants tend to file legal challenges in places where a favorable court ruling could tip the political scale, says Gimpel, a political science professor at the University of Maryland who is the lead author of the new paper, “The Geography of Law: Understanding the Origin of State and Federal Redistricting Cases,” published in Political Research Quarterly.

“These maps are frequently imperfect and poorly drawn and you can complain about just about every map in every state,” Gimpel says. “I think in purple states, there’s a strong incentive to use the courts to get a more favorable map.”

To study redistricting lawsuits, Gimpel and his fellow University of Maryland researchers, Tristan Hightower and Patrick Wohlfarth, gathered data on cases filed in state and federal courts nationwide from 1960 to 2019. Their dataset includes 917 federal cases and 1,105 state court cases.

The researchers learned that the number of federal redistricting lawsuits grew steadily for the first three decades. The number then dropped from a peak of 41 cases filed in 1992 to 27 in 2018.

State court challenges, on the other hand, fell across the study period — by about 20 cases a year, on average.

Lawsuits claiming partisan gerrymandering — drawing voting districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage — have risen over time and now match filings of race-based legal claims. Even so, far fewer disputes arise in states where one party has a clear majority of support, Gimpel and his colleagues find.

“Circumstances in which states have deeply entrenched partisan majorities in their congressional or state legislative delegations are unlikely to trigger redistricting complaints,” they write. “Even if a minority party might win a few such cases, an occasional victory is not likely to alter the balance of power in a politically lopsided state. Similarly, when a majority party is safe, map drafters in the legislature are not likely to engage in the kinds of questionable redistricting practices that might draw scrutiny. There is no need to draw unusual or distorted districts if a few seats will not change anything.”

At the state level, courts in California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey have seen the largest total number of redistricting lawsuits during this era. New York leads the group with 85 total state court cases.

The two federal judicial districts that have received the most redistricting complaints are the Middle District of Alabama, where 43 cases were filed during the study period, and the Northern District of Illinois, which received a combined 42 lawsuits. The Southern District of Mississippi ranks third with 37 cases.

Some states have avoided or mostly avoided the controversy. State courts in Utah and South Carolina had no redistricting cases filed between 1960 and 2019. Vermont and Delaware each had one. Meanwhile, there were no federal redistricting disputes filed in Idaho, Nevada, New Hampshire and Oregon. 

Another trend worth noting: The rising number of federal lawsuits claiming excessive partisanship in boundary drawing is a more recent phenomenon. Those cases began to increase after 2000, researchers find.

“Federal complaints about partisan bias increase in the years that new [redistricting] plans are adopted and also increase along with the population size of the state and the percentage of African American residents,” they explain. “As the congressional delegation becomes more politically divided — an indication of statewide partisan competition — the number of partisan gerrymandering suits also rises.”

Gimpel encourages journalists to monitor local redistricting discussions and any legal disputes that arise over the coming months. He offers these three tips to help bolster news coverage:

1. Don’t assume a lack of lawsuits means voting district maps in your area are well drawn. Ask whether voters have raised concerns and why they have not pursued legal action.

“Why is litigation only in some states and in some other states, we hardly ever see it?” Gimpel asks. “It’s not because some places have better maps. These problems with the maps are pretty common — you can find something wrong with any map that you look at.”

2. Find out who’s paying for redistricting lawsuits. If it’s an organization, look into where it gets its money and whether it has backed similar lawsuits in previous years or other states. 

Gimpel says redistricting lawsuits often name individual voters or groups of people as plaintiffs. However, someone else — an advocacy or partisan organization, for example — usually pays the legal bills.

“It is important to look at these groups and their approach,” he says, adding that some organizations might have considerable financial resources and political connections while others are relatively weak.

“There is no question that group strength varies,” he explains. “That matters, and reporters need to look behind it.”

3. Learn about district mapping because it’s more difficult than it appears.

Gimpel suggests journalists educate themselves about the rules and goals of drawing and redrawing voting districts. It’s a difficult task when each district within a state or region must encompass equal populations.

He also urges journalists not to rush to judgments about districts based solely on their size and shape. Some have odd shapes because of where homes are built within cities and unincorporated areas and because residents congregate near major roadways.

“It’s easy to draw districts that have strange shapes in the effort to equalize populations across districts,” Gimpel points out. “There are some very strangely-shaped districts that were not drawn that way for partisan reasons. I would hope that people would be less in a rush to judge these oddly-shaped districts as being partisan gerrymandering, because that’s not true much of the time.”

For help and insights, Gimpel recommends reaching out to political science professors who study redistricting and private-sector experts who specialize in mapping and using geographic information systems to capture and analyze geographic data. State government agencies are another resource. They employ people with mapping and GIS expertise to work on projects in areas such as redistricting, economic development and transportation.

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As the 2020 general election quickly approaches, voters across America are poised to cast an unprecedented number of mail ballots to avoid voting in person and risking contracting COVID-19.

In a normal year, most U.S. voters cast their ballots at polling places on Election Day or during early voting. Some vote by mail for various reasons, including being disabled or temporarily located in another state or serving overseas in the military. For the 2018 general election, about one-fourth of voters submitted mail ballots, according to a report the U.S Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan commission established by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, released in 2019.

“By-mail voting (often called absentee voting) allows individuals to receive their ballot in the mail before the election and mark their ballot away from the election office,” the report explains. “The marked ballot can be returned by mail to an election office or, in some states, dropped off at physical polling sites or designated drop-off boxes.”

Some 30.4 million Americans voted by mail for the 2018 general election — not counting citizens living abroad who are allowed to vote absentee under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Election officials rejected 1.4% of these mail ballots for a range of reasons such as arriving late, lacking a required signature and having a signature on the ballot return envelope that does not match the official voter signature on file.

This year, more than 82 million mail ballots have been requested or automatically distributed to eligible voters nationwide, an analysis from the United States Elections Project at the University of Florida shows.

Because mail ballots likely will play a significant role in this year’s presidential election, Journalist’s Resource set out to answer three big questions that many news outlets and their audiences will be pondering. We pored over the academic literature searching for studies that attempt to answer — or at least provide insights on — these three questions:

Does in-person voting raise the risk of COVID-19 infection?
If someone submits a mail ballot, what are the odds it will be rejected?
Do mail-in ballots benefit one political party over another?

Below, check out a sampling of recent journal articles and working papers we think newsrooms will find helpful. Four of them focus on voting in two battleground states — Florida, which allowed election officials to offer early in-person voting as early as Oct. 19, and Wisconsin, where early voting begins today. We provide a summary of each, highlighting key data and findings to help journalists cover these issues on deadline.

———–

Does in-person voting raise the risk of COVID-19 infection?

The following two studies examine voting during the Wisconsin primary election in April. While their findings appear to be contradictory, they are not. The two groups of researchers take different approaches to investigate the issue.

In the first, researchers look at the link between in-person voting and COVID-19 infection statewide, offering a high-level view. In the second study, researchers study in-person voting and positive tests for COVID-19 at the county level, allowing them to spotlight areas where an increase in voters per polling site was associated with a rise in the rate at which people in that state tested positive for the illness.

No Detectable Surge in SARS-CoV-2 Transmission Attributable to the April 7, 2020 Wisconsin Election
Kathy Leung, Joseph T. Wu, Kuang Xu and Lawrence M. Wein. American Journal of Public Health, August 2020.

Voting during the Wisconsin primary in April appears to have been “a low-risk activity,” according to a statewide analysis by researchers from the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control at the University of Hong Kong and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

The April 7 election “produced a large natural experiment to help understand the transmission risks” of COVID-19, the authors write. Of the almost 1.6 million votes cast, about 413,220 were from people who voted in person.

The researchers note that if voters contracted the coronavirus on April 7, infections would have been reported by April 17, on average. Considering the illness’ incubation period, most cases would have been reported between April 11-22.

The researchers learned that the number of COVID-19 tests conducted in the state that month remained stable. Meanwhile, hospitalizations for the illness declined in April.

The Relationship Between In-Person Voting and COVID-19: Evidence From the Wisconsin Primary
Chad D. Cotti, et al. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 27187, October 2020.

This paper provides a more in-depth look at in-person voting and COVID-19 transmission than did the prior analysis, which offers a statewide look at COVID-19 transmission in the wake of Wisconsin’s April primary election. By examining data collected in individual counties rather than across the state, researchers “observed a positive statistical relationship between county level in-person voting per location and COVID-19 spread.”

“Results show that counties which had more in-person voting per voting location (all else equal) had a higher rate of positive COVID-19 tests than counties with relatively fewer in-person voters,” write the authors. “Our results suggest that a 10% increase in voters per polling location leads to about an 18% increase in the test-positive rate.”

The researchers point out that in the weeks leading up to the primary, the Wisconsin Elections Commission allowed election clerks to make changes to the number of voting sites and voting setup. “Among clerks who modified the voting locations available to their registered voters, nearly all sought to consolidate — a decision that almost certainly increased the in-person voter density per voting location,” explain the paper’s authors, from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ball State University.

The authors suggest election officials reduce voter density to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“Although our results are not definitive,” they write, “they do suggest it may be prudent, to the extent possible during the COVID-19 epidemic and weighed against other factors, for policymakers and election clerks to take steps to either expand the number of polling locations, voting times, early voting opportunities, or encourage absentee voting in order to keep the population density of voters as low as possible. The above recommendations could be particularly beneficial to urban voters who face longer weight times and minority voters with substandard voting accessibility.”

If someone uses a mail ballot, what are the odds it will be rejected?

Vote-By-Mail Ballot Rejection and Experience With Mail-In Voting
David Cottrell, Michael C. Herron and Daniel A. Smith. Working paper, October 2020.

This analysis of ballot rejections during three elections in another key battleground state — Florida — finds that election officials were about three times more likely to reject the mail ballots of voters who did not have experience using them, compared with voters who had used mail ballots in prior elections.

In the 2020 primary election, for example, election officials rejected 1.22% of the mail ballots sent by voters who lacked experience using them after those ballots arrived late. They rejected 0.47% of mail ballots submitted by experienced users because of lateness, according to this working paper, from researchers at the University of Georgia, Dartmouth College and the University of Florida.

In this study, researchers deemed voters “experienced” if they submitted mail ballots in the two most recent general elections in Florida and their mail ballots were accepted.

They examined voting records across three elections — the 2016 and 2018 general elections and the 2020 primary election. In Florida, voting records are public, making it possible for researchers to see how many mail ballots were rejected and why. The researchers also were able to disaggregate rejection rates by age, gender and party registration as well as race and ethnicity.

Lack of experience was most harmful to Black and Hispanic voters and voters not affiliated with a major political party. Their mail ballots were most likely to be rejected because they arrived late or lacked a required signature or because of some other voter error — for example, the signature on the ballot return envelopes did not match the official voter signature on file.

“We suspect that one explanation for the latter is that independently minded voters wait longer to vote than do partisans, thus raising the risk of late mail-in ballots,” the authors explain. “This is compounded when independently minded voters are inexperienced with mail-in voting.”

The authors stress that their findings apply specifically to Florida and cannot be generalized to other parts of the country.

“We cannot be sure that our findings on the role of voter experience extend to other states, but the vast majority of states simply cannot be scrutinized in the way that Florida can,” they write.

Voting by Mail and Ballot Rejection: Lessons from Florida for Elections in the Age of the Coronavirus
Anna Baringer, Michael C. Herron and Daniel A. Smith. Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy, September 2020.

In this study of Florida voting records from the 2016 and 2018 general elections, researchers find that younger voters, those needing assistance to vote and those not registered with a major political party were more likely than other voters to have their mail ballots rejected. This paper, however, focuses only on mail ballots that arrived at election offices on time.

“We also find disproportionately high rejection rates of mail ballots cast by Hispanic voters, out-of-state voters, and military dependents in the 2018 general election,” the authors write. “Lastly, we find significant variation in the rejection rates of VBM [vote-by-mail] ballots cast across Florida’s 67 counties in the 2018 election, suggesting a non-uniformity in the way local election officials verify these ballots.”

In November 2016, more than 27,700 mail ballots — about 1% — were rejected despite arriving on time, the analysis reveals. In November 2018, elections officials rejected almost 32,000 mail ballots, or about 1.2%, that made it to election officials on time.

The rejection rate of mail ballots among voters aged 18 to 21 years was 3.9% in 2016 and 5.4% in 2018. The researchers also find that while voters aged 18 to 29 years cast 2.7% of all mail ballots in the 2016 general election, their ballots accounted for more than 11% percent of the mail ballots that arrived by the Election Day deadline but were not counted.

Researchers suggest differences in how election administrators evaluate voter signatures might explain some of the variation in rejection rates.

“Local elections officials have considerable leeway when evaluating the veracity of a signature on a VBM [vote-by-mail] ballot return envelope,” they explain. “Discretion of local election officials or county canvassing boards may result in unequal treatment of VBM ballots due to implicit biases or partisanship, allowing racial or party preferences to be subconsciously present.”

Do mail ballots benefit one political party over another?

Universal Vote-By-Mail Has No Impact on Partisan Turnout or Vote Share
Daniel M. Thompson, Jennifer A. Wu, Jesse Yoder and Andrew B. Hall. PNAS, June 2020.

Does allowing voters to cast their ballots by mail benefit one of the two major political parties more than the other? This study of elections held from 1996 to 2018 in three states finds that universal vote-by-mail — when every voter is mailed a ballot before an election and allowed to mail it back — “does not affect either party’s share of turnout or either party’s vote share.”

It does, however, increase the number of people who vote. An additional 2.1% to 2.2% of the voting age population participates in an election, estimate the researchers, who write that they believe their paper is “the most comprehensive confirmation to date of VBM’s [vote-by-mail’s] neutral partisan effects.”

Daniel M. Thompson, an assistant professor of political science at UCLA, and his colleagues studied elections held from 1996 to 2018 in California, Utah and Washington — three states that rolled out universal vote-by-mail county by county during that period. By comparing counties that had implemented vote-by-mail with counties in the same state that had not yet implemented the policy, researchers were able to study its impact on elections featuring the same set of candidates.

Thompson and his colleagues find that universal vote-by-mail leads to a larger number of people mailing their ballots — an estimated 14% to 19% more.

“As the country debates how to run the 2020 election in the shadow of COVID-19, politicians, journalists, pundits, and citizens will continue to hypothesize about the possible effects of VBM [vote-by-mail] programs on partisan electoral fortunes and participation,” they write. “We hope that our study will provide a useful data point for these conversations.”

America’s Electorate is Increasingly Polarized Along Partisan Lines About Voting by Mail During the COVID-19 Crisis
Mackenzie Lockhart, et al. PNAS, October 2020.

Two national surveys indicate a divide has emerged this year in terms of how voters aligned with the two major political parties want to vote in the 2020 presidential election. In both, Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to say they preferred to cast their ballots by mail.

Researchers used online surveys to ask two groups of eligible voters — 5,612 people in April and then 5,818 in June — how they wanted to vote and whether they support national legislation requiring states to provide absentee ballots for all voters requesting them.

“In April, 40.1% of Democrats indicated that they would like to vote by mail in November while 30.5% of Republicans wanted to vote by mail,” the authors write. “In June, this gap doubled as 44.8% of Democrats and only 25.5% of Republicans indicated they would like to vote by mail at this point.”

The surveys show high levels of support for national legislation requiring states to provide absentee ballots to voters who want to use them. In April, 87.3% of Democrats supported the proposal as did 64.1% of Republicans. In June, though, support was 2.3% lower for Democrats and 12.6% lower for Republicans, “suggesting an increasing partisan divide on the issue,” the authors write.

The researchers write that news outlets could be partly to blame for the change.

“One potential explanation for this is increasing media coverage that frames voting by mail as a partisan issue,” they write.

For more information to help you cover the 2020 election, see these 10 tips from the experts and our research roundup on voter intimidation.

This image was obtained from the Flickr account of Maryland GovPics and is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.

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Do U.S. citizens have an unqualified right to vote? Americans say that they do and, at election time, they are urged to exercise that right. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court — or more precisely, a faction within the Court — holds a different view, as does a corresponding faction of elected officials.

In 1937, the Supreme Court argued that Americans’ rights are hierarchical, that some are more fundamental than others. The ruling came in Palko v. Connecticut in which the Court declined to extend double-jeopardy protection to cases arising under state law. Barely more than a decade earlier, the court had upheld the right of free speech as being protected against state action. In justifying why one right and not another was protected, the court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment protects rights “fundamental” to liberty but does not necessarily protect other rights. Free expression was said to be “fundamental” in that it was “the indispensable condition of nearly every other right.”

Is the right to vote “fundamental”? By the Supreme Court’s own definition, it would appear to be. If citizens can be denied their right to vote, democracy would be a hollow promise. The wording of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause would also appear to suggest that states do not have the authority to erect barriers that would make it more difficult for a particular group to exercise its right to vote. The amendment reads in part, “No state shall deny … any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Yet, in a series of decisions stretching back to 2008, the Supreme Court has upheld state laws that burden the voting rights of particular groups. It let stand, for example, a 2017 North Dakota law that requires residents to have written proof of a street address before they can vote. The law targeted Native Americans who live on rural tribal lands, which don’t have names and numbers on all their roads.

The most far-reaching of the Supreme Court’s decisions is Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a 2008 ruling that upheld an Indiana law that requires citizens to have a government-issued photo ID card, such as a driver’s license or passport, in order to register to vote. That decision opened the way for more than two dozen other states to pass similar laws. And who, exactly, are the Americans who don’t have a driver’s license or passport? Well, compared with non-Hispanic white people, Black Americans are about three times more likely not to have one, whereas Hispanics are nearly twice as likely.

America has a lengthy history of abridging voting rights, most clearly in the South during the Jim Crow era when the grandfather clause, whites-only primaries, poll taxes and literacy tests were devised as ways to disenfranchise African Americans. That type of disenfranchisement was thought to have ended with passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court effectively gutted that protection in 2013. In Shelby County v. Holder, it invalidated the provision of the Voting Rights Act that required states and counties with a history of voter suppression to get permission from a federal judge before changing election procedures in a way that could disadvantage a minority group. Freed of the preclearance requirement, legislatures throughout the South have placed new restrictions on voter eligibility.

There’s a pattern to all of this. None of the aforementioned Supreme Court rulings was decided by a unanimous vote. Most were 5-4 decisions with all of the justices in the majority being Republican appointees. As for the states that have imposed additional burdens on the vote, virtually all were under Republican control at the time the law was passed.

The legal justification employed by the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices is the sanctity of the ballot. Precedent exists. In Rosario v. Rockefeller in 1973, the Court held that “preservation of the integrity of the electoral process is a legitimate and valid state goal.” In light of the fact that illegal voting is exceedingly rare, it is a thin reed on which to hang far-reaching decisions. But the precedent is there, and the Court’s Republican-appointed majority has made use of it.

In the three months between now and the November vote, as recent events including President Donald Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting have revealed, the election will be fought on several fronts, one of which will be ballot access. Journalists will need to help the public understand what’s at stake and why voting rights are less than absolute. It’s even possible that they will have the unenviable task of explaining why a flawed process was upheld by the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority. It won’t be the first time that journalists have been asked to do so. In 2000, they had to explain to their audiences why the court’s Republican appointees handed the presidency to George W. Bush by blocking a recount of the presidential vote in Florida.

Thomas E. Patterson is the Bradlee Professor of Government & the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School and author of the recently published Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?

Further reading:

Joshua A. Douglas, “Is the Right to Vote Really Fundamental?” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 18 (2008): 143-201.

Keesha Gaskins and Sundeep Iyer, “The Challenge of Obtaining Voter Identification,” Brennan Center for Justice, July 18, 2012.

Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, Citation: 553 US 181, 2008.

Shelby County v. Holder, Citation: 570 US 529, 2013.

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Voting procedures have rarely been a theme of election news coverage. This year is an exception. COVID-19 threatens to disrupt ballot access, creating the need to expand early voting and mail-in voting.

Despite polls showing that a majority of Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike support such measures, many officials — nearly all of whom are Republicans — have opposed taking these steps. The most vocal is President Donald Trump. In a tweet last week, Trump wrote: “Mail-In Voting . . . will lead to the most CORRUPT ELECTION in our Nation’s History! #RIGGEDELECTION.”

Voter fraud is a legitimate concern. It’s rampant in some countries and, when it occurs, it’s destructive. But it’s exceedingly rare in the United States. After the 2016 election, the New York Times queried state election officials across the country about voter fraud. No state said that fraud had been widespread and 26 states reported no instances of it.  In an attempt to show that voter fraud was widespread, Texas’ Republican attorney general launched an exhaustive investigation and found only two prosecutable instances of it — this in a state where 9 million voters go to the polls. Kansas’ Republican secretary of state sought to prosecute illegal voters, scouring the state’s nearly 2 million registered voters looking for culprits. He ended up with a mere handful, which a judge concluded were “explained by administrative error, confusion or mistake.”

There’s no mystery as to why voter fraud is rare. It is difficult enough to get eligible voters to the polls, much less to get those who are ineligible to knowingly take the risk. The penalty for illegal voting can be high — as much as a $10,000 fine and five years in prison in some states, and the incentive is low — the probability that a single vote will change the outcome of a national or statewide election is virtually zero. The odds of an individual being hit by lightning is 40 times greater than the likelihood that individual will commit voter fraud.

The rarity of voter fraud did not prevent Trump from claiming that unauthorized immigrants had cost him a popular vote victory in 2016. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he tweeted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Trump’s claim doesn’t stand up to a moment’s thought. Unauthorized immigrants often go to great lengths to avoid detection for fear of deportation. It’s hard to imagine a worse place for millions of them to try to hide out than at the nation’s polling stations on Election Day.

Nevertheless, there is a reasonable concern about massively expanding mail-in voting: the capacity of states and localities to provide it. It’s facile to say that some states already do it and that others can simply follow their lead. It’s true that five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — rely mostly on mail-in balloting. It’s also true that an additional 28 states allow “no-excuse” voting by mail, meaning voters aren’t required to provide a reason for not voting in person. But it’s true, as well, that all of these states had the luxury of time in preparing to institute their mail-ballot procedures.

Time is running short for a massive expansion of mail-in balloting, and states and localities are short of cash. Early in the pandemic, Congress allocated $400 million to the states for this purpose. But it was only a tenth of what states are projected to need, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. The best, and perhaps last chance, for significant additional funding is the COVID-19 spending package that’s now working its way through Congress. Yet it’s unclear whether such a provision would survive the Republican-controlled Senate or, if it did, that Trump would sign the bill.

If states were to greatly expand their mail-balloting option, risks will remain, though the risks do not include some of the possibilities that have attracted substantial news coverage. Given the decentralized nature of America’s voting procedures, which include within-state variation in the form of the ballot, Russia would find it nearly impossible to rig mail ballots. The risk from Russia is disinformation and, possibly though improbably, the hacking of voting systems. Individual-level fraud is also not a major concern. Any attempt to organize it at a large scale would be easily detected and dealt with. And there are plenty of safeguards for blunting such efforts by single individuals, including signature matching, bar codes, and post-election audits of mail-in ballots.

A major risk — and this is an area where journalists should focus their attention — will come from overwhelmed or non-compliant election officials. A massive increase in mail balloting would tax the capacity of some election clerks and invite mischief by those determined to tip the balance by slowing the process. We saw this in several states during the presidential primaries when tens of thousands of voters never received their requested mail ballot or received it too late to cast it.

The other major risk — and another one for journalists to watch — is that mail balloting will be conducted in a way that hurts minorities and poor people. They are less likely than other Americans to be aware of the option, and some states and localities make no effort to alert them to it. If the provision for mail balloting then becomes a pretext for cutting back on in-person polling places in their residential areas, their ballot access will shrink.

These are real problems and, make no mistake, they will surface in the months ahead. Journalists need to bring them to light as a means of reducing them. Many federal district court judges can also be expected to side with those who are being denied ballot access. But don’t expect help from the U.S. Supreme Court. In nearly every case that’s come before the Supreme Court, it has upheld voter suppression efforts, a subject that will be discussed in next week’s column.

Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government & the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School and author of the recently published Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself? Journalist’s Resource plans to post a new installment of his Election Beat 2020 series every week leading up to the 2020 U.S. election.

Further reading:

Benjamin Highton, “Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science 20 (2017): 149-167.

Justin Levitt, “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” Brennan Center for Justice, November 9, 2007.

R. Michael Alvarez, Ines Levin, and J. Andrew Sinclair, “Making Voting Easier,” Political Research Quarterly 65(2012):248-262.

Wendy R. Weiser, “To Protect Democracy, Expand Vote by Mail,” Brennan Center for Justice, June 30, 2020.

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From the Scholars Strategy Network, written by Sarah Elizabeth Gollust of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. This piece has been edited for Journalist’s Resource.

If there is one thing political scientists know about elections, it is that voting is not equally distributed across society. Young people, poor people, and people with just a high school diploma are less likely to vote than older people, wealthier people, and college graduates. We also know that people suffering poor health are less likely to vote.

But what about people who have chronic illnesses like cancer, heart disease, or arthritis?   Are people dealing with those long-term health problems more or less likely to vote than other citizens?

New research findings

In research done collaboratively with Wendy Rahn, I examined voting rates in the 2008 election for people who have one of five common chronic health problems — cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and arthritis. We used data from eight states where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted surveys in 2009. Statistical controls allowed us to pinpoint the effects of chronic illnesses, while taking into account many social and economic factors that are known to influence both voting rates and health, such as age, socioeconomic status, and residence in urban versus rural areas.

Our results show that specific chronic health problems are associated with different voting rates.

• People with cancer are almost three percentage points more likely to vote than otherwise similar people who do not have cancer.
• In contrast, people with heart disease are about 1.5 percentage points less likely to vote than similar people who do not suffer from heart problems.
• These differences in voting held even after we took into account whether respondents said they were disabled, enjoyed emotional support, felt sick or well, did or did not have health insurance, and indicated they had ever avoided seeing a doctor because of the expense.​

The impact of support groups and organized advocates

Why are people with cancer more likely to vote? Civic groups for people dealing with cancer may help to explain this finding. Across the United States, there are many well-established support groups and advocacy groups representing people with cancer, but similar groups are less prevalent for people with other chronic health problems. The prevalence of cancer support and advocacy groups may give cancer patients and survivors more social resources, social networks, and supports compared to people coping with heart disease.

Civic supports appear to make the biggest difference for the least advantaged patients and survivors. Our findings became especially intriguing when we looked separately at groups who tend to experience a higher burden of illness in society – namely, blacks compared to whites, and people with high school degrees or lower levels of educational attainment, compared to those with higher levels of attainment.

• Remarkably, we found that blacks and people with lower levels of educational attainment who have received a cancer diagnosis vote at rates almost four percentage points higher than would be expected given their social characteristics.
• This extra turnout boost was even greater than the boost we found for whites and better educated people with cancer.

Why health status matters in U.S. politics

The 2008 election was seven years ago, but it was a turning point election for health policy and politics, with reverberations that continue to this day. Health reform was a major voting issue in 2008, when the election of Barack Obama and Democratic Congressional majorities opened the door to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in March 2010. Implementation of this comprehensive reform law has, in turn, brought a significant expansion in health insurance coverage across the United States. Our research found that people who lacked health insurance in 2009 were 4.5 percentage points less likely to report voting in the 2008 election than those who did have health insurance coverage. We also found that people who reported being sick were more than 5.5 percentage points less likely to vote than people who said they were in excellent health. Our specific findings about higher voting rates for cancer sufferers versus people coping with other chronic health problems need to be understood in that larger context.

Our study identifies correlations, not evidence that these health-related factors cause people to vote more or less. Yet these findings offer some implications for the future. Over the past few years as the Affordable Care Act has been implemented, the percentage of Americans without health insurance has dropped to record lows.

• It remains to be seen whether the expansion of health insurance coverage to millions more people might shift voter turnout in 2016, as our evidence from the 2008 election would suggest.
• The people who have gained new health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act are concentrated in the approximately 30 states that have chosen to expand Medicaid, predominantly Democratic-leaning states and swing states. Yet, new health insurance enrollees are younger and less affluent, characteristics which traditionally predict lower voter turnout.

The voting differences we document for various groups of chronic disease sufferers may not matter as much in national elections as gaps by health insurance, health status, or socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, the example of cancer patients and the families and clinicians who care for them suggests that better organized chronic disease sufferers can be more civically engaged and have a considerable impact on Election Day.

Related research: Sarah E. Gollust and Wendy Rahn, “The Bodies Politic: Chronic Health Conditions and Voter Turnout in the 2008 Election,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law (forthcoming).

The authors are members of the Scholars Strategy Network, where this post originally appeared.

Keywords: voting patterns, chronic disease, voting bloc, voter turnout, election turnout

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