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Title: Polling Place Changes and Political Participation: Evidence from North Carolina Presidential Elections, 2008-2016
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2018
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Abstract: How is turnout affected by the decisions of election administrators to move Election Day polling places? We study the behavior of more than 2 million unique eligible voters across three presidential elections (2008-2016) in the swing state of North Carolina. We gather spatial information on the location of nearly every Election Day polling place location and we geolocate each voter relative to their polling place. Leveraging within-voter variation in polling place location change over time, we demonstrate that polling place changes reduce Election Day voting statewide on average, but that this effect is almost completely offset by substitution into early voting. This result obtains whether polling place changes increase or decrease travel costs, but Republican-led changes reduce overall turnout by producing less substitution relative to Democratic-led changes. We interpret our findings as highlighting the importance of early voting and voting primes for mitigating the non-travel costs of polling place changes
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Authors: Clinton, Joshua, D; Eubank, Nick; Fresh, Adriane; Shepherd, Michael, E
Publisher: Vanderbilt Unviersity
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other, Population Data Science
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