A recent episode of high-profile press coverage offers a cautionary tale about the perils of overclaiming about preliminary research and omitting important contexts, and other factors that affect the topic at hand, such as whether turnout alone is the best metric of what contributes to a more representative electorate. In this case, the focus was on which voting options and their associated bureaucracy did or did not boost overall turnout.
In an April 4 analysis, Nate Cohn, a New York Times data journalist and analyst of political trends, sparked a storm in election circles when he wrote that Democrats and Republicans were both mistaken "about whether making it easier or harder to vote, especially by mail, has a significant effect on turnout or electoral outcomes." He continued, "The evidence suggests it does not."
Cohn's blanket assertion mostly relied on a preliminary paper that focused on one bureaucratic hurdle in one version of voting with mailed-out ballots, in 2020. The Stanford study that Cohn drew on mostly looked at Texas, but said that its findings were applicable to 14 states -- that suspended their rule that voters declare why they cannot vote at the polls.
The researchers reported that removing the excuse, alone, boosted turnout by 0.8 percent. But they concluded that increase could be "statistical noise" that did not prove anything about making voting easier and boosting turnout. Cohn's conclusion, pinned on the preliminary study and older, pre-2020 research -- before 45 percent of the electorate voted with mailed-out ballots -- struck several nerves.
"The idea that making voting easier *won't* improve turnout is one of political science's worst takes," immediately tweeted Charlotte Hill, a University of California, Berkeley, PhD candidate and coauthor of a 2020 working paper finding otherwise under Colorado's universal vote-by-mail system. "And to be clear, many political scientists don't buy it."
Cohn did not discuss other versions of mail-based voting where 2020 turnout went up -- such as the 10 states that mailed every voter a ballot to minimize the health risks. But he cited older research -- from before voting with mailed-out ballots more than doubled nationally in 2020 -- that found, as he wrote, that "[a]lmost everyone who cares enough to vote will brave the inconveniences of in-person voting to do so."
That assertion offended advocates who applauded election officials' extraordinary efforts to expand voting options. And it was seen as immoral by organizers who strove to help millions of voters who used these options for the first time, despite ex-President Donald Trump's attacks on 2020's expanded options and on the voters using them.
"Voters are more than just numbers on a @Nate_Cohn spreadsheet," tweeted Fair Fight, a Georgia-based group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams. "They are people. Implying [that] 12-hour lines are not that bad because voters will find a way to make up for lost wages or they'll vote after they faint is cruel and racist. Turnout would be even higher if not for barriers."
Cohn, notably, had defenders. Rice University's Robert Stein, who has studied elections for decades and worked in Texas and elsewhere to expand 2020's voting options, said that Cohn's report stayed within the boundaries of the academic research that he cited.
"Nate Cohn did not write what I will call 'fake news,'" Stein said. "He wrote the right article based on much of the literature on convenience voting...What Nate was writing about was one form of vote by mail, and that is excuse or no-excuse mail-in voting."
But Cohn's critics countered that voting in 2020 was so different from prior presidential elections -- with 56 million people casting ballots in a new way for the first time -- that it was premature to overly rely on new research or on pre-pandemic literature. (The 56 million figure is based on U.S. Elections Project data from 2016 and 2020, and its recent report comparing turnout differences for early and mail voting.)
"The assumption of a continuity in the research findings from studies of absentee voting and the like in the past and this election could be incorrect, certainly at the margins," said Minnite. "But it is at the margins that elections are won or lost."
What Doesn't Turnout Measure?Voter turnout is the "most basic measure of the success of an election," Persily and Stewart noted in the Journal of Democracy. But in 2020 that metric "does not inventory the ways in which the Trump administration, allied election administrators and outside groups undermined the execution of the election," another data scientist commented in his private newsletter. Nor does turnout, alone, address another core issue: if specific voting options helped historically infrequent or low-propensity voters.
"There is an assumption that the more people are participating, then the closer we have gotten to the goal of the electorate being the same as the overall population," PPIC's McGhee said. "I think it is true that turnout level and the representativeness [are] certainly likely to be correlated with each other, but they are not the same thing. We have to be really careful about that. And the follow-on question of 'how does this voting method affect that representativeness?' is a super important one."
The equity, or representativeness question, is what researchers like McGhee are now delving into next as they keep studying 2020's voting options and voter turnout. But in the meantime, other data, including from nonacademics such as political data firms, about the impacts of certain voting options is filtering into 2021's political fights.
Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located and an election jurisdiction larger than 25 states, operated eight 24-hour voting centers last fall to accommodate voters who could not leave their work or family obligations. It was one of many innovations to make voting more accessible, including drive-through voting sites and mailing voters absentee ballot applications.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
