Cost of Voting in the American States: 2022*

The ease of voting across the American States is constantly changing. This research updates work that established the relative "cost of voting" during presidential election cycles, in each of the 50 states, from 1996 to 2020. A 2022 iteration is necessary to consider the flurry of new legislative initiatives that passed state legislatures after the 2020 election cycle. Many states made voting easier by codifying changes composed in response to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Other states, over concerns about voter fraud and seemingly at the prompting of former President Donald Trump, took a step backward and made voting more difficult. We learn that Oregon, which has the most progressive automatic voter registration process and all-mail voting, maintains the first position as the easiest state to vote in. Mississippi (49th) and New Hampshire (50th) stay at the bottom of the rankings as the most difficult states for voting. Their failure to move is largely due to these states failing to keep pace with reforms like online voter registration, no excuse absentee voting, and automatic voter registration, which have taken place in other states. Voters in Vermont will find voting much less challenging in 2022 as the state has adopted nearly all the progressive reforms used in other states that make voting easier, not the least of which is an all-mail balloting process.

The Impact of Vote-By-Mail Policy on Turnout and Vote Share in the 2020 Election

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred many states and counties to reduce public health risks by adopting policies that made voting by mail easier in the 2020 general election. Employing a two-period difference-in-difference research design, this article investigates how these policy changes affected turnout and presidential vote share. We find that counties that moved to send registered voters mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day experienced 2.6 percent higher turnout compared to counties that made no change, although lesser reforms may have hindered turnout. We also find no evidence that making voting by mail easier conferred a partisan advantage. © 2022, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

Vote-by-Mail: COVID-19 and the 2020 Presidential Primaries.

In this year of pandemic, it seems assured that a record number of citizens will choose to vote by mail. But approval of this method of voting appears increasingly divided along partisan lines, thanks in part to President Trump's declamations. Evidence from the presidential primaries held earlier this year indicates that allegiance to the president, as well as relative lack of concern about the COVID-19 virus, made voters less likely to choose to vote by mail.

Universal vote-by-mail has no impact on partisan turnout or vote share.

In response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), many scholars and policy makers are urging the United States to expand voting-by-mail programs to safeguard the electoral process. What are the effects of vote-by-mail? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive design-based analysis of the effect of universal vote-by-mail-a policy under which every voter is mailed a ballot in advance of the election-on electoral outcomes. We collect data from 1996 to 2018 on all three US states that implemented universal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. We find that 1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party's share of turnout, 2) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party's vote share, and 3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates. All three conclusions support the conventional wisdom of election administration experts and contradict many popular claims in the media.