There are a lot of factors that affect voter turnout in the United States — race, income, education, electoral competitiveness, the list goes on and on.
Many of those factors are outside policymakers' control. But there’s one big realm that they have a lot of influence over: voting access laws, which vary significantly from state to state. Is early voting allowed? How about no-excuse absentee voting? Are there strict voter ID laws, lax ones or none at all? Can convicted felons vote?
These laws generally affect how easy it is to cast a ballot in a given election. In a new report, political scientists at Northern Illinois University, Jacksonville University and China’s Wuhan University seek to quantify the net effect of a state’s election laws to determine the “time and effort” it takes to vote there. They call their project the Cost of Voting Index and have published it in the September issue of the Election Law Journal.
To create the index, the researchers collected data on 33 types of election laws that generally fell into seven different categories: voter-registration deadlines, restrictions on registrations and registration drives, preregistration laws that allow people under 18 to register in advance of their first elections, laws governing ease of voting (like early and absentee voting), voter ID requirements and polling hours.
