GOTV Effect and Election Laws: How Election Laws and GOTV Effects are Related in the United States

Voting and elections are the cornerstones of democracy. For decades campaigns and grassroots organizations have utilized Get-Out-the-Vote to motivate potential voters to turnout. Situated within an understanding of Rational Choice Theory, voters must see a decrease in effort or an increase in benefits to be persuaded to vote; this is what Get Out the Vote attempts to do. While there has been significant research dedicated to both Get Out the Vote tactics and election laws’ impact on turnout, there has not been the dedication of research toward the intersection of these two topics. This thesis seeks to understand how election laws are associated with the effectiveness of Get Out the Vote. Using the Cost of Voting Index and a sample of 265 Get Out the Vote experiments, an OLS multiple linear regression was run on the data to determine the relationship between strict voting laws and the cost of voting in the United States