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REVISITING THE U.S. VOTING SYSTEM: A RESEARCH INVENTORY

November 27-28, 2006

Convened by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Robert M. Stein & Gregory Vonnahme

ELECTION DAY VOTE CENTERS

Efforts to increase voter turnout through changes in the administration of elections have focused on several reforms including: Election Day voter registration, relaxed absentee voting, by mail and in-person early voting. These efforts have not significantly increased voter turnout. Why? Like Downs (1957) we believe the cost of voting is largely tied to the time and inconvenience associated with the act of voting. We suggest that previous electoral reforms may not have effectively addressed this aspect of the cost of voting and thus failed to adequately remedy the ‘inconvenience’ of voting, particularly for non-habitual voters. We examine an alternative conceptualization of the cost voting with a new electoral reform, Election Day Vote Centers (EDVC). EDVC is partially designed to reduce the inconvenience and inaccessibility of Election Day voting.

In 2003 Larimer County, Colorado replaced precinct based polling places with Election Day Voting Centers (EDVC). Since 2004 20 of 64 counties in Colorado have adopted Election Day Voter Centers. Sixteen used EDVCs for the first in the November 2006 midterm election.

Election Day Voting Centers are non-precinct based locations for voting. The sites are fewer in number than precinct-voting stations, centrally located to major population centers (rather than distributed among many residential locations), and rely on county-wide voter registration databases accessed by electronic voting machines. Voters in the voting jurisdiction (usually a county) are provided ballots appropriate to their voter registration address. The two distinguishing features of EDVC are that all vote centers are open to all voters in the county and the locations are more accessible and contain many more voting machines than precinct based voting places. Election Voting Centers are often located in places more central to the both residential and work place locations, the latter often more accessible and convenient to voters as they commute to work, school, shopping and other activities. Voting centers are equipped for electronic voting machines and staffed with personnel to assist voters. Essentially Election Day Voting Centers operate the same way early voting does in many states, except it occurs on Election Day.

Previous research on Larimer County’s EDVCs has found that voter turnout increases significantly with the adoption of this electoral change. Moreover, the impact of EDVC is specifically targeted to those individuals who either recently registered for the first time or who re-registered to vote after changing residential location. The magnitude of these effects for the general electorate is 3%-5% and 12%-15% for new registrants and movers.

We are currently investigating the impact of EDVCs on several dependent variables including: voter turnout, voter satisfaction/evaluation, and voters’ likelihood for over and under voting. Other intermediary effects that will be studied include length of lines and time to vote, when people vote (i.e., time of day), where individuals choose to vote (e.g., distance from home, work, school and shopping), evaluation of poll workers and the need for assistance when voting. Finally, we examine the costs of administering EDVC against previous precinct based voting. The Colorado experience with EDVC provides a field experiment with which to study how voters respond to this method of voting under different durations of operation.