Voting Reforms Little Help to Poor: MIT Study

Easy Voting No Easy Answer

TallahasseeJoe

Electoral reforms enacted over the past thirty years to make voting easier have unexpectedly reinforced biases in favor or the well-educated and well-off, a new study suggests. The author urges electoral reformers to shift focus from institutional changes to encouraging political engagement.

The 2004 study, conducted by Adam J. Berinsky of the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), was published in the journal American Politics Research, Vol. 31, No. 10.

Reform advocacy groups like Common Cause note that less advantaged citizens are less likely to vote, and often argue that this reflects the "direct costs" of voting - the burden of actually getting to the polls amid the responsibilities of jobs and childcare.

Voting by mail, early voting, and easy access to absentee ballots have all been introduced to make voting easier. These reforms were widely expected to increase voter turnout, to make the electorate more representative of the general population, and to benefit Democratic candidates over their Republican rivals.

But the MIT study, "The Perverse Effects of Electoral Reform in the United States" claims that these reforms "may have slightly increased turnout" but have ironically increased the socioeconomic biases of the electorate. Dr. Berinsky bases his conclusions on a review of several empirical studies that examined voter turnout before and after the introduction of reforms.

Dr. Berinsky points out that the "direct costs" of getting to the polls are only half the story.

The deeper problem is that higher-income and better-educated voters tend to be more informed about and engaged in politics, an important part of why they are more likely to vote. It turns out that even these more privileged voters often miss an election - say, because they are sick or unexpectedly out of town on Election Day. But according to Dr. Berinsky, reforms like early voting make this group of voters less likely to miss elections for such superficial reasons.

Less privileged citizens, on the other hand, tend to be less interested in politics to begin with. Thus they may never vote at all - and the reforms do little to overcome their lack of interest.

"The true costs of participation lie not just in the expression of opinion but in the formation of political opinions . . . Certainly, making the act of participation as simple as possible is a worthy goal," Dr. Berinsky concludes, "but institutional reforms have taken us as far as they can toward a democratic electorate. . . we must focus reform efforts on increasing the engagement of the electorate with the political world . . ."