The relative cost of voting in red & blue states
A recent study reported a cost of voting index, designed to provide a comparative estimate of the ease of voter registration and voting across all 50 states. I noticed many of the high cost states are red states (dominated by the Republican party) and many of the low cost states are blue states (dominated by the Democratic party), and wanted to more precisely quantify the relative voting costs based on political party dominance.
The study, Cost of Voting in the American States: 2020, by Scot Schraufnagel, Michael J. Pomante II, and Quan Li, was published online in the Election Law Journal on 13 October 2020. The cost of voting index (COVI) is calculated using principal component analysis (PCA) based on 5 variables relating to voter registration laws and 4 variables relating to casting ballots.
- Voter registration deadline
- Voter registration restrictions
- Voter registration drive restrictions
- Pre-registration laws
- Automatic voter registration
- Voting inconvenience
- Voter ID laws
- Poll hours
- Early voting
The bar chart from the paper (below) shows the relative costs of voting in each state based on these variables:
I manually scraped the data shown in the chart and color-coded the data based on two ways of measuring the strength of party dominance in different states.
One method of differentiating red states from blue states is based on the proportion of the four most recent U.S. presidential elections in which the state was carried by a party in the electoral college.
I first color-coded each state in the original COVI chart based on these proportions and generated a new chart, and calculated the mean COVI value across states in each category.
This chart helps highlight a strong correlation between low cost of voting and states that have voted Democratic in each of the last 4 elections (mean COVI: -0.54), and a high cost of voting in states that have voted Republican (mean COVI: 0.34). The three “split” states — Iowa, Ohio and Florida (mean COVI: 0.28) — were all red states in the 2016 presidential election, and are all currently considered swing states in the 2020 presidential election.
Another way of differentiating red states from blue states is based on the composition of their state governments: whether or not a single party controls the governorship and both legislative houses — what Ballotpedia calls a “trifecta “— and if so, whether the controlling party is Republican or Democratic.
I color-coded each state in the original COVI chart based on the 15 Democratic trifectas and 21 Republican trifectas, generating yet another chart, and showing the mean COVI value across states in each category.
Once again, the chart highlights the difference in the relative cost of voting, with a mean COVI of -0.47 in states having Democratic trifectas and a mean COVI of 0.37 in states with Republican trifectas.
The authors of the study do their best to present a fair and balanced analysis, noting that “the relative cost of voting is not necessarily a partisan matter” and “the cost of voting does not always associate with Democratic or Republican Party influence over state legislative processes”. However, it is pretty clear that there are strong correlations between party influence and relative costs of voting.
The authors cite other studies showing that vote-by-mail processes and automatic voter registration — both of which reduce the costs for voters — also reduce the administrative costs for governments. This would not be the only area in which concerns about different costs might exhibit partisan bias.
Efforts by the Republican party to increase the cost of voting — also known as voter suppression — are well documented. Among other hopes I entertain for the current election is widespread voting cost reductions in future elections.
