Race and Registration Roadblocks in the American States

• In Event: Election-Related Challenges to Democracy in the U.S.

Abstract

Rebekah Herrick, Professor of Political Science, Oklahoma State University, [email protected]

Joshua Jansa, Associate Professor of Political Science, Oklahoma State University, [email protected]

Matthew Motta, Assistant Professor of Health Law, Policy, and Management, Boston University School of Public Health, [email protected]

Given the US’s ugly history of disenfranchising racial minorities it is imperative that we fully understand how voter registration laws affect minority voter participation. The US is unique in that voters have to take two steps to vote: 1) registering to vote and 2) casting a ballot.

Although all voters have to register to vote at some point, not every voter has to register anew before an election. The only would-be-voters needing to register are those who just came of age since the last election, just became citizen since the last election, recently moved, felons who have just had their voting rights restored, those whose names have been purged and those who for whatever reason have chosen not to registered before. These groups of Americans are most affected by registration laws and are disproportionally comprised of African-Americans, Latinx, and Asian Americans (Schaefer 2019, Passel, 2007, US. Census 2021, Solomon 2012).

Do voter registration laws disproportionally affect voter registration and turnout rates of racial/ethnic minorities?

Previous research has had mixed results as to the effects of voter registration laws on racial/ethnic minorities’ participation rates (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980, Lee 2010, Martinez and Hill 1999, Hill 2003, McGhee, Hill, and Romero 2021, Garnett 2021). However, previous research has tended to examine individual registration laws in isolation instead of examining their cumulative effects, or as part of an index with laws that regulate casting ballots rather than voter registration.

We believe that when measuring state’s registration laws comprehensively, the cumulative effects of voter registration laws will be found to have a greater effect on the enfranchisement of racial/ethnic minority Americans than non-Hispanic White Americans.

In order to test the cumulative effect of multiple registration laws, we propose to use a unique index of registration laws, the difficulty of registration index (DORI) (Jansa, Motta and Herrick 2022). It creates an index of five key registration laws (deadline, portability, mode, preregistration and automaticity) through the use of Item Response Theory. We use DORI and Census Bureau data to compare the voting and registration rates of non-Hispanic Whites, African Americans, Latinx, and Asian Americans in all 50 states from 2000-2022. Using this IRT measure of registration difficulty helps to isolate the effect of registration on minority voters in a more precise and comprehensive way than previous studies, and over a longer time period.

References

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Jansa, Joshua M., Motta, Matthew, & Herrick, Rebekah. (2022). Finding DORI: Using Item Response Theory to Measure Difficulty of Registration in the U.S. and Its Impact on Voters. American Politics Research, 50(3), 336–352. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211055050

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https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2007/03/28/v-characteristics-of-naturalized-and-eligible-populations/
Schaeffer, Katherine. 2019, The most common age among whites in U.S. is 58 – more than double that of racial and ethnic minorities
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Authors

• Rebekah Herrick, Oklahoma State University

• Joshua Jansa, Oklahoma State University

• Matt Motta, Boston University School of Public Health