New Paper: The Effect of All-Mail Elections on Turnout

ISPS Faculty Fellows, Alan Gerber and Greg Huber, and co-author Seth Hill (UC San Diego, formerly at ISPS), published an article in the inaugural issue of the journal, Political Science Research and Methods (PSRM), published by the European Political Science Association.

The article is titled, Identifying the Effect of All-Mail Elections on Turnout: Staggered Reform in the Evergreen State and it explores the effect of moving to all-mail elections on participation.

From the abstract: “Current estimates of the effect of all-mail elections on turnout are ambiguous. This article offers an improved design and new estimates of the effect of moving to all-mail elections. Exploiting cross-sectional and temporal variation in county-level implementation of all-mail elections in Washington State, we find that the reform increased aggregate participation by two to four percentage points. Using individual observations from the state voter file, we also find that the reform increased turnout more for lower-participating registrants than for frequent voters, suggesting that all-mail voting reduces turnout disparities between these groups.”