This article argues that administrative burden—that is, an individual's experience of policy implementation as onerous—is an important consideration for administrators and influences their views on policy and governance options. The authors test this proposition in the policy area of election administration using a mixed‐method assessment of local election officials. They find that the perceived administrative burden of policies is associated with a preference to shift responsibilities to others, perceptions of greater flaws and lesser merit in policies that have created the burden (to the point that such judgments are demonstrably wrong), and opposition to related policy innovations.

State governments have experimented with a variety of election laws to make voting more convenient and increase turnout. The impacts of these reforms vary in surprising ways, providing insight into the mechanisms by which states can encourage or reduce turnout. Our theory focuses on mobilization and distinguishes between the direct and indirect effects of election laws. We conduct both aggregate and individual-level statistical analyses of voter turnout in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. The results show that Election Day registration has a consistently positive effect on turnout, whereas the most popular reform-early voting-is actually associated with lower turnout when it is implemented by itself. We propose that early voting has created negative unanticipated consequences by reducing the civic significance of elections for individuals and altering the incentives for political campaigns to invest in mobilization. Authors are listed alphabetically. Replication data and supplemental information may be accessed at electionadmin.wisc.edu and the AJPS Data Archive. nation involves rethinking the calculus of voting to focus on the net consequences of election laws, that is, the sum of both direct and indirect effects. Direct effects stem from the costs imposed by the state and include registration requirements, polling locations and hours, and rules such as identification requirements. Yet an exclusive focus on direct effects leads to a misunderstanding of how election laws indirectly affect mobilization by nongovernmental actors such as the media, campaigns, interest groups, friends, and family. These actors indirectly raise or lower the costs of voting depending on how much information they provide and the social incentives for voting they generate. The added convenience of early voting decreases the direct costs of voting, but this effect is more than offset by

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