“How Election Rules Affect Who Wins”, 2024-04-06 (; similar):
Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes.
We offer an analytical framework to explain why. Contrary to heated political rhetoric, election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.
After developing this framework, we address how the findings bear on minority voting rights. We then show that counter-mobilization from political parties cannot explain the small effects of election laws.
We explain that even when a state passes multiple policies at the same time, the reforms will still only have a marginal effect on turnout and an ambiguous effect on who wins.
Finally, we explain what policies should raise alarm about affecting outcomes.
…Our answer is that modern election reforms target narrow shares of the population, have a small effect on turnout, and/or are imprecisely targeted at members of political parties. To see how this combination of facts results in small effects, consider an initial, hypothetical example with features that will be similar to actual examples used throughout the paper. Suppose a state recently held a close election in which 51% of voters supported the Democratic candidate and 49% of voters supported the Republican candidate. In response to the election, the Republican-controlled state legislature passes a bill that imposes additional requirements to vote and these requirements disproportionately target Democratic voters. Specifically, the additional requirements target 4% of the electorate and as a result of these requirements, there will be a 3 percentage point decline in turnout in this group. The targeted group is strongly Democratic: 60% of the targeted group supports the Democratic presidential candidate.
What would happen if the 51:49 election were held again and everything about the election was the same except for this law? The policy would cause a 0.12 percentage point decline in the overall turnout. And it would cause a 0.011 percentage point decline in the two-party vote share for the Democratic candidate. In other words, the Republican party would lose the election with nearly identical results: in the new election 50.989% of voters would support the Democratic candidate while 49.011% would support the Republican candidate. If the state had one million eligible voters, the policy would deter 720 Democratic voters and 480 Republican voters, netting the Republicans a 240-vote shift.
…The effects of election laws on turnout are so small that scholars analogize the effect sizes to the modest impact of campaign advertisements on participation. Studying the turnout effects of majority-minority districts—a powerful reform stemming from the Voting Rights Act—2015 writes, “The effects I find are roughly equivalent to receiving an impersonal contact encouraging a registrant to vote.” The effects of all-mail voting, 2020 suggest, are “somewhere between one nonpartisan get-out-the-vote solicitation over the phone and one social-pressure mailer”.