Cost of Voting in the American States: 2022*

Scot Schraufnagel, Michael J. Pomante, and Quan Li
Published Online:16 Sep 2022
https://doi.org/10.1089/elj.2022.0041

Abstract
The ease of voting across the American States is constantly changing. This research updates work that established the relative “cost of voting” during presidential election cycles, in each of the 50 states, from 1996 to 2020. A 2022 iteration is necessary to consider the flurry of new legislative initiatives that passed state legislatures after the 2020 election cycle. Many states made voting easier by codifying changes composed in response to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Other states, over concerns about voter fraud and seemingly at the prompting of former President Donald Trump, took a step backward and made voting more difficult. We learn that Oregon, which has the most progressive automatic voter registration process and all-mail voting, maintains the first position as the easiest state to vote in. Mississippi (49th) and New Hampshire (50th) stay at the bottom of the rankings as the most difficult states for voting. Their failure to move is largely due to these states failing to keep pace with reforms like online voter registration, no excuse absentee voting, and automatic voter registration, which have taken place in other states. Voters in Vermont will find voting much less challenging in 2022 as the state has adopted nearly all the progressive reforms used in other states that make voting easier, not the least of which is an all-mail balloting process.

Introduction
In the aftermath of the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, in 2013, legislatures in the American states, which needed preclearance to change state election laws, went into overdrive and passed a series of measures that made voting more restrictive. In roughly the same period, other states began to take advantage of new technologies that negated the need for a voter registration deadline and simplified the administration of absentee voting. Both changes make voting less costly.

Something similar happened in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. The year 2021 was particularly noteworthy, with 19 states passing at least 33 new laws that made voting more difficult, while 25 states passed 62 laws, which reduced the cost of voting.1 We have researched voting law changes dating back to 1996, and in the aftermath of the 2016 election cycle, we published a comprehensive Cost of Voting Index (COVI) for all 50 states (Li, Pomante, Schraufnagel 2018). At the time, we felt comfortable providing quadrennial appraisals and values. However, the spate of changes in 2021, and early 2022, motived us to provide a 2022 update to the COVI.

This latest version introduces some new considerations to our analysis. For comparison purposes, it would be nice to use the same set of variables each time we update the index. However, state legislatures are often creative and develop new laws, or sets of laws, in a way that compromises a static approach to index construction. What we would gain by consistency in measurement would come at the price of completeness. Throughout the different iterations of the COVI, we have always erred on the side of providing a comprehensive look and have sacrificed the value of a fixed comparison over time. What does not change, however, is our use of sub-indices, identified as issue areas, and the principal component analysis (PCA) applied to produce index values.2 We score all variables, again, such that a larger number indicates greater cost.


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