DC Accepted Papers Paper:
Effects of Voter Registration Purging in Florida and Georgia during the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
As elections in the United States become more politicized, more expensive, and more aggressive, every vote is crucial for both hopeful candidates and their respective political party. Coupled with a decrease in turnout over the past several decades, the two major political parties have been looking for opportunities to either expand their vote share or minimize their opposition’s vote share. One of the battlegrounds for this conflict has been state election policy; when one state devises an innovative policy strategy to affect potential vote share, states with similar political leanings tend to quickly follow suit with their own legislation ahead of the next election. One such strategy is removing, or purging, voters from registration rolls, which has been debated over the past century as election policy and the electorate itself have evolved. While this practice has significant implications for voter registration rates, turnout rates, and election outcomes themselves, especially in the last decade, very little empirical research has been conducted to study such effects. Therefore, this project looks at turnout, the number of provisional ballots cast, and state election outcomes to determine the relationship between voter purging and various types of voting policy metrics. The primary dataset is the Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) with supplementary data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the CQ Voting and Elections Collection. The analysis is confined to Florida and Georgia between 2010 and 2018 as these states are in proximity to each other and, therefore, are likely to share several cultural characteristics, have similar state-level election cycles, and have previously been accused of using voter registration purges as a tool to suppress voter turnout of certain counties and populations. The results of this project significantly contribute to the study of election policy by verifying the relationship between voter registration purging and these essential election quality metrics.
