My colleague “Elizabeth Rigby”:http://www.tspppa.gwu.edu/faculty/rigby.cfm sends this along as a follow-up to my “earlier post”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/10/early_voting_depresses_turnout.html:
bq. In a recent NYT op-ed, Barry Burden and Kenneth Meyer describe their work (with David Canon and Donald Moynihan) that finds a negative consequence of early voting laws: lower voter turnout. In the “op-ed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/opinion/25mayer.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss and “the paper”:https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/bcburden/web/bcmm2010.pdf, they highlight the potential for Election Day Registration (EDR) to help remedy this perverse consequence of early voting. My colleague Melanie Springer and I came to a similar conclusion in “our forthcoming study”:http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=elizabeth_rigby of “income bias” among the American electorate–in short, we looked at how much more likely the wealthy are to vote compared with the poor. Examining data on presidential and midterm elections from 1978-2008, we concluded that early voting has the potential to exacerbate income-based participation gaps, while EDR holds the potential to reduce them.
bq. Despite how consistent our findings are with Burden et al (as well as “previous work”:http://web.mit.edu/berinsky/www/ElectoralReform.pdf on the perverse consequences of early voting), we note how contrary they run to the current trends in state electoral reform. States have focused on expansion of early voting (and other “convenience voting” reforms) with very little change in the number of states’ allowing EDR. This trend is even more pronounced among states with large gaps in voting between their rich and poor citizens. In fact, during the 2008 presidential election, eight of the ten states experiencing the most income bias allowed early voting, but only one of them allowed EDR. The ten states with the most income bias in voting during the 2008 presidential election (in descending order) are: HI, AZ, AR, TX, CT, WV, ID, KS, NM, and MO. All but CT and MO allow early voting. Of these ten, only Idaho has adopted EDR.
bq. Of course, the flip side of this trend is that EDR represents an untapped opportunity (in the 41 states without it) which may be used by states wishing to counterbalance the perverse consequences of the increasingly-popular convenience voting reforms.