Health Risks and Voting: Emphasizing Safety Measures Taken to Prevent COVID-19 Does Not Increase Willingness to Vote in Person

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231168354
• Author: Scott E. Bokemper,Gregory A. Huber,Alan S. Gerber
• Date: 01 September 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(5) 588–598

© The Author(s) 2023

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sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231168354

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Health Risks and Voting: Emphasizing Safety

Measures Taken to Prevent COVID-19 Does

Not Increase Willingness to Vote in Person

Scott E. Bokemper

1

, Gregory A. Huber

2

, and Alan S. Gerber

2

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic made salient the risks posed by an infectious disease at a polling place. To what degree did such health

risks, as with other changes to voting costs, affect the willingness to vote in person? Could highlighting safety measures reduce

the association between COVID fears and unwillingness to vote in person? Using both a representative survey of Connecticut

voters and a survey experiment, we examine whether concerns about health diminish willingness to vote in person. We f‌ind

correlational evidence that those who are more worried about COVID-19 are less likely to report they will vote in person, even

when considering risk mitigation efforts. We then present causal evidence that mentioning the safety measures being taken does

little to offset the negative effect of priming COVID-19 risk on willingness to vote in perso n. These results contribute to a

growing literature that assesses how health risks affect in person voting.

Keywords

covid-19, turnout, political behavior, persuasion

The spread of COVID-19 throughout the United States made

the conduct of the 2020 presidential election a public health

issue. In a large scale national survey, worry about COVID-

19 was reported as the most common reason for why people

chose to vote by mail instead of in person, suggesting that

beliefs about COVID-19 may have kept people away from

polling places and potentially explaining why half of the

electorate chose to cast their ballots by mail (Stewart 2021).

Although there are robust literatures on how the costs of

voting affect turnout (e.g., Sigelman and Berry 1982) and

who prefers mail to in-person voting (e.g., Plescia et al.,

2021), as well as work on how health affects voter turnout

(e.g. Burden et al., 2017;Gollust and Rahn 2015;Mattila

et al., 2013;Ojeda and Pacheco 2019;Pacheco and Ojeda

2020), less is known about whether potential exposure to an

infectious disease affects people’s willingness to vote in

person and whether election off‌icials communicating their

plans for mitigating the risks posed by an infectious disease is

suff‌icient to assuage voters’concerns about going to the polls

and their willingness to vote in person.

We conducted a representative survey of registered voters

in Connecticut to assess the relationship between reported

concerns about COVID-19 and preference for voting in

person. As part of Study 1, we gathered information about

support for potential COVID-19 risk mitigation efforts that

could be taken to reduce the risk of in-person voting. This

survey provides correlational evidence about the relationship

between fear of COVID-19 and preference for mode of

voting, preferred risk mitigation efforts, and stated willing-

ness to vote in person if those steps were taken. We f‌ind that

voters who report being more concerned about COVID-19

are less willing to vote in person, even if risk mitigation

measures are taken.

This observational data motivated Study 2, a survey ex-

periment f‌ielded on a national sample in the days leading up

to the November 2020 election. This allows us to assess the

causal relationship between outreach communicating

COVID-19 risk reduction efforts and stated willingness to

vote in person among a sample that had not already voted at

the time the survey was conducted and may not have been

able to substitute to another form of voting. The specif‌ic risk

mitigation efforts we described are drawn from items ranked

as important at high rates in Study 1. This is therefore an

informative test of the effect of outreach about risk mitigation

efforts. Despite high levels of stated support for COVID-19

risk reduction efforts in our f‌irst survey, we f‌ind that

1

Independent Research, Waukee, IA, USA

2

Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Gregory A. Huber, Yale University, ISPS, 77 Prospect Street, PO Box

208209, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.

Email: gregory.huber@yale.edu