‘The Quiet Revolution’
By: Mit Election Lab
Tags: Esra2019, Politics, Voting, Elections

Election reforms involving convenience voting have a greater impact on otherwise lower turnout elections such as local elections. One less-explored process of convenience voting are vote centers (sometimes referred to as countywide polling places) — locations in a county where all voters will vote, regardless of their address.

Academic studies of vote centers, although narrow in scope, have found that vote centers increase turnout and boost turnout among those voters who are less likely to vote. Yet, the evidence is mixed, with some scholars finding no significant effect. However, despite claims of electoral efficiency, little academic work has explored the larger effects of vote centers beyond one state or across elections. In addition, no study has explored individual-level change, especially among populations that might be more sensitive to changes in the location of polling places.

In 2005, the Texas Legislature allowed counties to move from precinct level voting to county-wide vote centers. Vote centers are theoretically less expensive to administer and convenient for many voters, but less is known about the impacts on specific communities. In this paper, we explore the impact of a switch to county-level voting (away from precinct-level voting locations) on voting behavior of racial and ethnic minorities.

Using Texas’ registered voters list from the Secretary of State’s Voting Division, the project will use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to calculate estimated driving distances and times from each registered voter’s residence to the voter’s vote center location. We focus on seven counties from which we obtained precinct-level voting locations and vote center locations: McLennan, Montague, Navarro, Rusk, Taylor, Tom Green, and Wharton. These counties all made the transition from precinct-level voting locations to vote centers in 2014, so to ascertain the impact that geographic distance between a voter’s residence and the nearest polling location (and a change from that location) has on turnout, we geocoded each voter based on their permanent residence and estimated the driving distance to each precinct level voting location and the nearest vote center.

The effects of vote centers on counties vary — some counties (Navarro and Rusk) see an increase in voter turnout, while others see a decrease (Montage and Tom Green). The results overall show that the displacement of traditional precinct level voting and the increase in distance between polling locations takes a greater toll on voter turnout for voters in rural counties and Latinos, especially in such counties that experienced significant growth of the Latino population (McLennan County).

The figures below show the predicted probabilities of voting in the 2014 midterm as a function of driving distance:

(a) McLennan County, Hispanic voters:

(b) Rural counties, all voters:

Such systematic differences highlight a potential criticism of vote centers — the impacts on voting may be non-uniform and may positively affect turnout in locations or elections where turnout is somewhat likely or counties are smaller (where voters are likely more homogenous). Taken together, these results suggest a more cautious assessment is needed when considering the impact of vote centers.