Proper Protective (Voting) Equipment: How Covid-19 Safety Measures Shaped In-Person Voting Experiences During the 2020 Election

• Author: Joseph Coll
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221112396
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(6) 798–810

© The Author(s) 2022

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sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221112396

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Proper Protective (Voting) Equipment: How

Covid-19 Safety Measures Shaped In-Person

Voting Experiences During the 2020 Election

Joseph Coll

1,2



Abstract

Leading up to the 2020 election, many Americans were worried about casting a ballot in-person due to the Covid-19 pandemic

and supported measures to protect voters at the voting booths. Addressing these concerns, election administrators enacted

multiple Covid safety measures (e.g., routinely cleaning voting booths, wearing face masks, and providing singl e use ballot pens).

Given voters’health concerns related to the pandemic and support for safety measures at the ballot box, the presence of Covid

safety protocols may increase how safe voters feel voting in-person and evaluations of their voting experience. Using the 2020

Survey of the Performance of American Elections, this study f‌inds that the presence of Covid safety meas ures increased feelings

of voting safety, evaluations of poll workers, and the positivity of the voting experience, but typically not polling place

evaluations; though, effects differ by Covid safety policy.

Keywords

Covid-19, voter safety, voter experiences, voter perceptions, survey of the performance of American elections

Introduction

The smooth administration of elections is critical for voter

perceptions of and participation in the democratic process.

Previous work has shown that election administration can

affect voter evaluations of poll workers and polling places

(Claassen et al., 2008;Stein & Vonnahme,2012), thei r voting

experience (Stein et al., 2008), their conf‌idence in the ac-

curacy of the vote count (Atkeson et al., 2010;King, 2017),

whether they renege on voting (Lamb, 2021), and if they

decide to cast a ballot in the next election (Pettigrew, 2021).

At the same time, election administrators and street level

bureaucrats were put in a diff‌icult position when it came to

conducting the 2020 presidential election. Despite large

concerns in the public over the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic

(Kamisar & Holzberg, 2020), many Americans still intended

to vote in-person. As such, administrators were tasked with

conducting elections in a way that would allow for safe

in-person voting while not negatively impacting voter experi-

ences. To facilitate safe, in-person voting, election jurisdictions

across the country employed a host of Covid protection

measures, such as wearing face coverings, socially dis-

tanced voting, and cleaning voting booths between voters

(National Governors Association, 2020). Though previous

work has examined how changes to the voting and regis-

tration process affected voter turnout during the 2020

election (e.g., Curiel & Clark, 2021), less work has

examined how changes to the design of in-person polling

places shaped voter perceptions of the voting process.

To investigate the impact of Covid-19 safety features on

in-person voting experiences, this study uses data from the

2020 Survey of the Performance of American Elections

(Stewart, 2021). The presence of Covid safety policies is

measured using voter self-reports of poll workers wearing

face masks, poll workers wearing face shields, protective

barriers between voters and workers, protective barriers

between voting booths, voting lines spaced further apart,

voting booths spaced further apart, hand sanitizer availability,

single use pen availability, and routine booth cleaning, with

the f‌irst six policies aimed at air transmission reduction and

the f‌inal three at surface transmission reduction. These pol-

icies were also used to create an additive index of how safe

the polling place was set up.

Results from a series of two-stage Heckman selection

models to account for selection bias f‌ind voters felt safer

1

Political Science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

2

Department of Politics, Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee, TN,

USA

Corresponding Author:

Joseph Coll, Department of Politics, Sewanee: The University of the South,

735 University Avenue, Sewanee, TN 37383, USA.

Email: jacoll@sewanee.edu