How the Delegation of Voting Rights Affects the Measurement of Voting Behavior

Research on the effect of state election laws on turnout, participation, election outcomes, and policy is extensive, but little work has investigated the effects of different election administrative procedures. The existing literature assumes that election laws are implemented as written, but there is substantial anecdotal evidence that this is not the case. While state legislatures and state constitutions structure the legal conditions for voting, local registrars are charged with administering the process. These officials are frequently unaware of or misinformed about the laws, granted insufficient resources to properly determine who is eligible (or ineligible) to vote, and in some cases purposively act in opposition to state and federal law. We argue that scholars can not fully understand the impacts of these laws on turnout and election outcomes without opening this black box of election administration. Using a dataset of county level election returns we find that states can mitigate variation in turnout by engaging in monitoring strategies and provide evidence that the partisanship of local administrators matters for turnout. Page 1 In 2005 Indiana state officials enacted a law requiring voters to show government issue