Campus Voting During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• Published date: 01 May 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X241230050
• Author: Michael McDonald,Enrijeta Shino,Daniel A. Smith,Payton Lussier,Danielle Dietz
• Date: 01 May 2024

Article

American Politics Research

2024, Vol. 52(3) 225–238

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X241230050

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Campus Voting During the COVID-19

Pandemic

Michael McDonald

1

, Enrijeta Shino

2

, Daniel A. Smith

1

,

Payton Lussier

1

, and Danielle Dietz

1

Abstract

How did the pandemic impact turnout of young voters living in university communities? Leveraging the mandatory vacating of

Florida college students living on campuses and drawing on administrative data from Florida’s voter file, we argue that on-

campus registered young voters who had to leave their university housing in the days prior to Florida’s 2020 Presidential

Preference Primary (PPP) were less likely to turn out compared to adjacent off-campus young voters because they lost the

opportunity to cast early in-person and Election Day ballots. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, we find that on-

campus students, in part because they had early and Election Day voting available to them on campus in the 2020 general

election, were more likely than comparable off-campus student-aged registered voters to cast ballots in the Novembe r election.

Our study has important implications for academic debates concerning the turnout effects of convenience voting reforms and

the ability of voters to cast ballots prior to Election Day.

Keywords

turnout, COVID-19, college students, convenience voting

Democracy is predicted on the notion that government

policies are reflective of the will of the people. In the context

of democratic elections, voters constitute “the people,”yet

politicians widely regard electoral rules as capable of

sculpting the electorate (Palazzolo & Ceaser, 2004)soasto

alter the costs of voting for certain groups (Riker &

Ordeshook, 1968). Election reforms providing greater con-

venience to certain voters may reduce voting costs, thereby

increasing turnout, the representativeness of the electorate,

and responsiveness of government to the people (Li et al.,

2018).

One election administration reform at face value that

would appear to reduce voting costs is early in-person voting.

Such convenience voting provides eligible voters with the

option to cast their ballots prior to Election Day, in times,

manners, and locations most convenient to them. Yet, this

notion is deeply contested within academic research. Some

scholars find early voting modestly increases overall turnout

(Gronke et al., 2008), has no effect as voters simply substitute

how and when they cast their ballots (Berinsky, 2005), or may

even decrease turnout by diffusing voters’perceived value of

their vote to the election outcome (Burden et al., 2014). The

turnout effects of early voting in these studies of aggregate

turnout may be confounded by campaign and institutional

factors, and may thus fail to uncover statistical evidence for

turnout effects when early voting changes affect narrow

groups. Recent studies that isolate effects of early voting

changes find communities of color are negatively affected by

a reduction of Sunday early voting options Herron and Smith

(2014) and by a reduction of early voting hours Bitzer et al.

(2023). Conversely, providing access to early voting polling

locations on college campuses may increase students’par-

ticipation (Grumbach & Hill, 2022;Shino & Smith, 2018).

We contribute to the debate concerning the turnout effects

of early in-person voting through the lens of the latter studies

that isolate effects on specific groups, namely student voting

during the pandemic, by leveraging an “as if”natural ex-

periment (Dunning, 2008). The COVID-19 pandemic caused

major disruptions in the 2020 presidential election cycle

(McDonald, 2022). In early 2020, colleges and universities

around the world were evacuated to reduce the spread of the

coronavirus. In Florida these changes affected voting dur-

ing an election. Days prior to the state’s March 17, 2020

1

University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

2

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Enrijeta Shino, Department of Political Science, University of Alabama,

326 Ten Hoor Hall, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0166, USA.

Email: eshino@ua.edu