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Main Authors: Tomkins, Sabina, Yao, Keniel, Gaebler, Johann, Konitzer, Tobias, Rothschild, David, Meredith, Marc, Goel, Sharad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01728
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author Tomkins, Sabina
Yao, Keniel
Gaebler, Johann
Konitzer, Tobias
Rothschild, David
Meredith, Marc
Goel, Sharad
author_facet Tomkins, Sabina
Yao, Keniel
Gaebler, Johann
Konitzer, Tobias
Rothschild, David
Meredith, Marc
Goel, Sharad
contents 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 voting behavior, 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2105_01728
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Blocks as geographic discontinuities: The effect of polling place assignment on voting
Tomkins, Sabina
Yao, Keniel
Gaebler, Johann
Konitzer, Tobias
Rothschild, David
Meredith, Marc
Goel, Sharad
Applications
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 voting behavior, 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.
title Blocks as geographic discontinuities: The effect of polling place assignment on voting
topic Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01728