Early Voting and Turnout

All responsibility for interpretations lay with the authors. Early or convenience voting--understood in this context to be relaxed administrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast a ballot at a time and place other than the precinct on election day--are a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically, reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, and reducing as many barriers in the way of the polls is an important tool to get there. Arguments made in favor of voting by mail, in-person early voting, and relaxed absentee requirements share this common characteristic. While there are good theoretical reasons, drawn primarily from the rational choice tradition, to believe that early voting reforms should increase turnout, the empirical literature has found decidedly mixed results. While one prominent study suggests that voting by mail is associated with a 10% increase in turnout, other studies find smaller--but still statistically significant--increases in turnout associated with other convenience voting methods. This paper reexamines the impact of early voting reforms on turnout, extending earlier research in two ways. First, we examine a wider set of elections than one prominent study (Southwell and Burchett 2001), which estimated the impact of voting by mail on turnout i