Blocks as Geographic Discontinuities: The Effect of Polling-Place Assignment on Voting

Abstract

A potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast an in-person ballot, including the costs associated with identifying and traveling to a polling place. In order to investigate how these costs affect voter turnout, we introduce two quasi-experimental designs that can be used to study how the political participation of registered voters is affected by differences in the relative distance that registrants must travel to their assigned Election Day polling place and whether their polling place remains at the same location as in a previous election. Our designs make comparisons of registrants who live on the same residential block, but are assigned to vote at different polling places. We find that living farther from a polling place and being assigned to a new polling place reduce in-person Election Day voting, but that registrants largely offset for this by casting more early in-person and mail ballots.

Did private election administration funding advantage Democrats in 2020?

“…The effect of the grants on turnout was less than half of the effect of an extra day of early voting ( 18 ), roughly half of the effect of a mailer encouraging citizens to vote by mail ( 47 ), less than one-tenth of the effect of universal vote by mail ( 16 , 20 ), and less than one-twentieth of the effect of mobile voting ( 48 ). While the estimated effects of polling place locations on turnout are typically noised than our estimates of the effects of grants, our estimates of the effects of grants tend to be smaller than the effect of having your polling place moved further away ( 15 , 19 , 36 ). Our estimates of the effects of grants on turnout are small compared to all of these administrative changes.…”

“…A substantial share of the funds was spent on activities that would most plausibly affect participation through wait times and in-person voting (e.g., hiring more poll workers, opening more polling places, etc.). Still, similar exercises using a similar approach for other common interventions—like adding ballot drop boxes ( 34 ), expanding mail voting ( 20 ) ‡‡ , adding polling places ( 15 , 19 , 36 ), and expanding early voting hours ( 17 , 18 )—all of which were also funded by CTCL funds, lead to the same conclusions. A large share of counties also reported spending money in ways that should have even smaller effects on participation and partisan balance like purchasing personal protective equipment for poll workers or purchasing new election equipment.…”

“…This leads to a conventional wisdom that spending more or less will have substantial effects on the outcomes of elections. Yet, while some changes in state and local election administration can affect participation and alter the composition of the electorate, the turnout effects tend to be modest, and the compositional effects are often hard to predict ( 14 – 21 ). Further, despite large differences between the Democratic and Republican positions on how much money to spend on elections, Democratic local officials do not produce more turnout or higher Democratic vote shares than do Republican local officials ( 22 ).…”