Funding Elections & Opening Polls Increases Turnout: A Field Experiment

• In Event: Experiments in Representation

Abstract

Do increases in election funding lead to increases in the number or polling places and increased voter turnout? In the U.S., local election officials make decisions about how many polling locations to open. This includes decisions whether to open early voting and ballot dropbox locations. The administrative decisions can impact voters and the ease of access to the polls. I argue that funding nonpartisan election administration plays a key role in increasing voting access and vote turnout. This article examines the impact of increased election administration funding in counties in former Section 5 Voting Rights Act states, which are counties mostly in the South with histories of racial discrimination against voters. In the field experiment, a treatment group of local election officials were randomly encouraged to apply for nonpartisan philanthropic funding from the USC Schwarzenegger Institute; and a control group of local election officials were not. All local election officials who applied received nonpartisan grants to open early voting polling locations, open election day polling locations, and hire additional poll workers. In total, about $2.5 million in funding to increase voter access was given to counties who were randomly encouraged and applied for the philanthropic nonpartisan funding for elections. Results of the field experiment show that the randomized encouragement led to a 3.9%-point increase in local officials applying for the funding compared to control group officials. In a 2SLS model with the county as the unit of analysis, voter turnout in the county is the dependent variable in the second-stage equation. In this 2SLS analysis, counties that applied for and received grant funding had about a more than 1%-point increase in voter turnout in the 2020 general election for president compared to counties that did not receive funding. Additional analyses only in Georgia, which was the state where most of the nonpartisan grant funding was allocated, show similar results leading to increased voter turnout. The voter turnout results are robust to the inclusion of co-variates such as previous turnout, other funding from the Chan-Zuckerberg foundation, and demographic variables. The policy implications for voting rights, voter turnout, and bureaucracy are discussed. I conclude that increasing the budget for local election administration leads to increased voter access, and that local election administrators can be encouraged to seek additional funding for elections.

Author

• Christian R. Grose, University of Southern California