Administrative Burdens & Voter Turnout: The Direct Costs of Voting

• In Event: The Consequences of Electoral Laws and Administration

Abstract

Despite record voter turnout in the 2020 Presidential Election and the 2022 midterm elections,
turnout in the United States lags that of most other developed democracies (DeSilver, 2021, 2022). Only 64 percent of eligible citizens cast a vote for president in 2020 (McDonald, 2023). However, 94 percent of those registered to vote did so (DeSilver, 2022). This implies an interruption between citizens’ desire to vote and the process of registering to vote. Some argue this low turnout in the U.S. is explicitly connected to the uniquely complicated process of registering to vote (Scher, 2015; Holbein and Hillygus, 2020; Lichtman, 2020). To the extent that voting can be a complicated process, it is important to consider who these complications might push out of the electorate.

To actually vote in the United States, individuals must spend some amount of individual time and energy navigating institutional obstacles associated with casting a ballot. Overly bureaucratic tasks such as registering to vote within the appropriate timeframe, finding the correct polling location, understanding the requirements of casting a ballot, and making time to get to a polling place can often impose a variety of obstacles for citizens. Often referred to as the costs of voting, these considerations feature prominently in the rational choice model of voting (Downs, 1957), but can also be thought of as “administrative burdens” in public policy literature. These burdens can—intentionally or unintentionally—impose such costs on citizens or create barriers in the process of engaging with the government (Soss, 1999; Herd and Moynihan, 2019). In the case of voting, increased burdens may reduce turnout (Highton, 1997; Highton and Wolfinger, 2001).

To explore how the administrative burdens of voting might shape turnout, I leverage variation in the shifting patchwork of voting laws for each state in the past 6 presidential elections. I specifically draw from the Cost of Voting Index, maintained by Schraufnagel et al. (2022) to capture the direct costs of voting in each state for each presidential election between 2000 and 2020. I use this variation to understand subsequent voter turnout through a series of two-way fixed effects models exploiting variation over time, across counties, and between low- and high-education counties to isolate the impact of the cost of voting on voter turnout. These analyses utilize county-level voter turnout rates for all six presidential elections between 2000 and 2020 alongside educational and demographic information for each county.

I estimate that a standard deviation increases in the aggregate “costs of voting” decrease turnout in U.S. counties by 1.1 percentage points. Consistent with other work, I find that these changes in the cost of voting affect county-level turnout in the expected directions (Schraufnagel et al., 2022; Goodman and Stokes, 2020; Bonica et al., 2021; Blagg and Blom, 2018; Persson, 2014; Holbein and Hillygus, 2016). My subsequent analyses illustrate how these impacts are larger for counties in the bottom quartile of within-state education distributions. The estimated impacts are concentrated among counties with the lowest education levels—a one standard deviation increase in the cost of voting only decreases turnout by 0.86 percentage points in highly-educated counties of each state. Put plainly, increases in the cost of voting hit less-educated counties harder, even after accounting for several other county-level factors that also shape turnout.

In detailing the impacts of changes in the costs associated with voting, this work contributes to electoral research on how the costs of voting affect turnout. Due to the decentralized nature of electoral laws in the U.S., voters must navigate a plethora of different costs associated with registering to vote, identifying the options to vote, navigating specific polling place’s locations and hours, and eventually casting a vote. While this paper does not make claims about any specific election laws, it accounts for the bundle of costs associated with voting across all states for multiple election years. This work also demonstrates how changes in the costs of voting likely do not affect all citizens the same, perhaps explaining some of the mixed findings in the voter costs literature.

This paper also joins contemporary work documenting the impacts of administrative burdens on political behavior. These costs have received far less attention than they are due, particularly in their capacity to exacerbate inequities (Herd et al., 2023). This is also true of the administrative burdens of voting (Kuk et al., 2022; Fraga and Miller, 2022; Barreto et al., 2022). Focusing on one dimension of inequity, this study contributes to our understanding of how such burdens can push individuals with less education out of the electorate.

Author

• Cameron Arnzen, Brown University