States adjusted
their election administration procedures during the 2020 election in response
to the pandemic. Among other adaptions, they expanded the use of absentee
ballots, added drop boxes, and instituted various cleaning and social
distancing procedures to increase the odds that virus-wary Americans would feel
safe casting their ballots.

Did these changes appreciably affect turnout, and did they favor either
party?

To answer these questions, I turned to Professor Zachary Courser. He co-directs Claremont McKenna College’s Policy Lab, an interdisciplinary policy research program that teaches students policy writing and research skills that prepare students for work in legislatures, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations. Together with his co-director Eric Helland and their Policy Lab students, they have been collecting and analyzing data on the 2020 election. Our chat is below.

Kosar:
Voter turnout during the presidential election went up during the pandemic,
contrary to expectations. How much higher was it in 2020 than in 2016?

Courser: There were concerns during the
2020 primaries that coincided with the first state-level orders to close public
spaces that states would be unprepared to deal with an elections emergency at
the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Ohio and Wisconsin experienced
a lot of disruption and confusion during primaries in March and April that
helped to depress turnout. However, judging from the 2020 general election
turnout, states managed to adjust very well under these challenging conditions.
The 2020 general election saw a nationwide turnout of 66.2 percent, which is 7
points higher than in 2016. This was the highest level of turnout since 1960.
Every state had higher turnout, with the highest increase of 14.2 percent in
Hawaii, and the lowest a still impressive 2.5 percent in Oklahoma. In fact, it
was difficult to find places in the US where turnout was down compared to 2016.
Looking at county-level turnout, only 4 percent of counties experienced a
downturn. So, yes, despite a global pandemic, turnout was high and broadly
distributed across states and counties in 2020 compared to 2016.

Your Policy Lab created a scorecard to measure states’ adaptations to make voting accessible during the pandemic. Some states scored well; others little altered their election administration during the pandemic. Did the election administration changes increase turnout?

We created a vote access score for each
state based on their access changes in 2020, and examined whether county-level
turnout was associated with it. States scored between -1 (Indiana) and +16 (New
Jersey), with the median state scoring 5. Using a variety of demographic control
variables in our turnout model, we found that a 0.3 percent increase in turnout
at the county level was associated with a point on our access score. For the
median state, this meant 1.5 percent of the increase in county-level turnout
was associated with state-level access changes. These findings indicate that
more open vote access policies during the 2020 election had a positive effect
on turnout.

Previously your research found that states that lean Democratic tended to make more changes to their elections access policies than states that lean Republican. You have done some additional analysis. Did these changes produce any partisan advantages? I ask because there are critics on the right who claim states like Pennsylvania juiced the Democratic vote by expanding voting by mail and the like.

There were a variety of state responses
to the pandemic, many of which were predicated on partisanship. As we know, the
pandemic itself became a partisan issue during 2020, which helped develop a
partisan divide on how or whether states ought to adjust their vote access
laws. Democratically-controlled states tended to go farther in making
adaptations to increase vote access, whereas Republican-controlled states
tended to do less. There were some exceptions for red states that had
Democratic governors, but the relationship was clear: We found a 0.416
correlation between state-level partisanship and our 2020 access score. The
more blue the state, the more likely it took steps to expand access. The more
red, the less likely it made these changes.

Despite this correlation, our analysis of
state-level access changes on county-level turnout did not find a statistically
significant relationship between turnout and partisanship. We added a county’s
percent vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to our turnout model, and did not find
it was significantly associated with turnout. In Pennsylvania, which scored 6
on our access scale, we associate their increase in access with an increase in
county-level turnout of nearly 2 percent. According to our results, which
analyzed over 3,000 counties, this increase was not likely to vary in relation
to how Republican or Democratic a county was in 2016.

Thank
you, Zach.

The post Did States’ 2020 Election Adaptations During the Pandemic Affect Turnout? A Q&A with Zachary Courser appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.