People vote for many reasons, including civic duty, self-interest, and a desire to be involved in politics. But given the many other demands of daily life, voting can easily be disrupted by a rainy day or other costs imposed upon the voter. What are these "costs" of voting? They include the time one spends voitng, locating the voting place, waiting in line to vote, traveling to and from a polling place and learning enough about the ballot choices to make one's vote minimally informed.
This project quantifies costs of voting and suggests strategies that might be used to increase turnout. It uses natural experiment that occur from time to time when some polling places are consolidated by election administrators so that precincts are larger and there are fewer places to vote. The recent spate of statewide special elections in 2003 and 2005 in California generated a number of polling place consolidations. The process of selecting which polling places to close versus which to leave open - and hence those voters who will vote at a new location versus those who will vote at their old one - is, for most practical purposes, random. Hence, by observing differences in behavior between people whose polling places are consolidated and people whose polling places are not, we can see what effect an increase in costs - having to find a new polling place, and traveling additional distance to reach it - has on voter turnout.
For a half century, political science has grappled with the paradox of voter turnout - why people vote despite the fact that a very basic cost-benefit analysis says they shouldn't. This project will represent a significant advance in solving this paradox; it will precisely measure the costs of voting via comparison of similar voters incurring different costs, and will identify the thresholds at which voting behavior may change. It will also indentify different types of costs, and reveal which are more troublesome.
A common public policy goal in most democracies is to maximize voter turnout to the highest achievable level, in order to have an electorate that is as representative of the citizenry as possible and thus enhance the legitimacy of the democratic process. Identifying the costs citizens face when choosing whether to vote or not permits policy makers to take affirmative steps to minimize those costs and thus achieve that critical policy goal.
