Location, Location, Location: Precinct Placement and the Costs of Voting

Haspel, Moshe; Knotts, H. Gibbs

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2005.00329.x

Cited by 153 publications

(113 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Scholars have increasingly utilized GIS to estimate the effect of space on political behavior (Enos 2010), accessibility to the ballot (Gimpel and Schukneckt 2003), and voter turnout (Dyck and Gimpel 2005;Haspel and Knotts 2005). We used the address information of LNS respondents to calculate their exact distance to every protest location.…”

Section: Figure 2 Number and Size Of Protests Over The Immigrant Righmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes

Wallace

Zepeda-Millán

Jones-Correa

2013

American J Political Sci

105

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This article utilizes data from the Latino National Survey (2006) to analyze temporal and spatial variation in the effects of the immigrant rights marches in 2006 on Latino attitudes towards trust in government and self‐efficacy. Using a unique protest dataset, we examine the effects of proximity and scale by mapping respondents’ specific geographic location against the location of the marches as well as size of the protests using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We find that local proximity to small marches had a positive impact on feelings of efficacy, whereas large‐scale protests led to lower feelings of efficacy. The results shed light on the role localized political events can play in shaping feelings towards government, the importance of conceptions of space and time to the study of social movements, and the positive outcomes that can result from contentious politics.

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Section: Figure 2 Number and Size Of Protests Over The Immigrant Righmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes

Wallace

Zepeda-Millán

Jones-Correa

2013

American J Political Sci

105

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Instead, we focus on a rather inconspicuous and routine election administration task that is regularly carried out by nearly all local election officials-the drawing of precinct boundaries and the selection of Election Day polling places. With the exception of two prominent studies (Brady and McNulty 2011;Haspel and Knotts 2005), scholars have not fully investigated how altering Election Day precinct boundaries and their accompanying polling locations may affect voter turnout, even though such changes may raise both the search and transportation costs for some voters.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Reprecincting and Voting Behavior

2016

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Despite the expansion of convenience voting across the American states, millions of voters continue to cast ballots at their local precincts on Election Day. We argue that those registered voters who are reassigned to a different Election Day polling place prior to an election are less likely to turn out to vote than those assigned to vote at the same precinct location, as a new precinct location incurs both search and transportation costs on reassigned voters. Utilizing voter file data and precinct shape files from Manatee County, Florida, from before and after the 2014 General Election, we demonstrate that the redrawing of precinct boundaries and the designation of Election Day polling places is not a purely technical matter for local election administrators, but may affect voter turnout of some registered voters more than others. Controlling for a host of demographic, partisan, vote history, and geospatial factors, we find significantly lower turnout among registered voters who were reassigned to a new Election Day precinct compared to those who were not, an effect not equally offset by those voters turning to other available modes of voting (either early in-person or absentee). All else equal, we find that registered Hispanic voters were significantly more likely to abstain from voting as a result of being reassigned than any other racial group.

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“…A lower number of polling stations not only increases the average travel costs of voting, but may also result in longer lines at the remaining stations. Haspel and Knotts (2005), studying the 2001 Atlanta mayoral race, find that small differences in the distance to the polls may have a significant effect on voter turnout. For the present dataset, the coefficient in a regression of the number of polling stations per 1000 inhabitants on a dummy for electronic voting (controlling for municipal fixed effects and year dummies) is −0.114 (t -value −11.0), implying a strong and highly significant reduction in the average number of polling stations by about 11%.…”

Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 98%