The low voter turnout is not a coincidence, according to a ranking of the voting facility in the 50 states

In the United States, many factors affect voter turnout: race, income, education, electoral competitiveness, and so on.

Many of these factors are beyond the control of decision makers. But they have a lot of influence on another area: the laws on access to votes, which vary considerably from one state to another. Is advance voting allowed? What about postal voting without excuse? Are there strict voter identification laws that are weak or non-existent? Can convicted criminals vote?

These laws generally affect the ease with which it is possible to vote in a given election. In a new report, political scientists from Northern Illinois University, Jacksonville University and Wuhan University in China seek to quantify the net effect of a state's election laws to determine the "time and effort required to vote in this country". They called their project the Cost of Voting Index and published it in the September issue of the Election Law Journal.

To create this index, researchers collected data on 33 types of electoral laws, which generally fell into seven categories: voter registration deadlines, registration restrictions and registration campaigns, laws of pre-registration allowing people under 18 years of age to register before the first elections. , the laws governing the ease of voting (such as advance voting and distance voting), voter identification requirements and voting hours.

They mixed each of these qualitative factors into a statistical mixer to create a summary summary of the ease of voting and registration in each state. For the 2016 election, states are ranked according to their position in this index on the map above.

The easiest state to vote that year was Oregon, according to the index. Voters are automatically registered and the state sends ballots to each elector several weeks before the elections. Oregon is followed by California, North Dakota (which does not even have voter registration) and Iowa.

Conversely, the index finds that voting is the toughest in Mississippi, which comes in last place in the rankings. The state requires a photo ID at the polls. It does not allow advance voting, or the default vote without excuse. He is joined at the bottom of the list by Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana and Texas.

What kind of effect do these laws have on voter turnout? Some quick calculations suggest that the effect is potentially quite significant: the participation rates of the five most restrictive states in 2016 were, on average, nine percentage points lower than those of the five easiest states to vote. If we calculate the cost of voting Index rank against the 2016 participation rate, this looks like this.

(Christopher Ingraham / The Washington Post illustration)

Even a simple correlation, such as the one above, suggests a relationship between ease of voting and participation: In general, states with the least restrictive voting laws have higher participation rates.

But it is also clear that the voting laws do not explain everything. Hawaii, for example, had the lowest turnout in 2016, despite fairly loose voting laws. Virginia, on the other hand, had a strong participation despite a restrictive voting environment.

To isolate the effect of the legal landscape from other factors, the researchers who created the Voting Cost Index conducted a more comprehensive analysis that took into account per capita income and high school graduation rates, as well as competitiveness of the elections at the top of the list. ballot, measured by the size of the final voting margin (assuming that the most competitive races will have lower margins).

In controlling for these other factors, they found that the participation rate in 2016 was expected to decrease by approximately 3.3% for each increase in a unit with voting difficulties measured by the index. In other words, the difference between the electoral environment in Oregon (ranked No. 1 in 2016) and Iowa (ranked No. 5). Overall, the model predicts a difference in participation of 11 points between the least restrictive and the most restrictive states in 2016.

These results strongly suggest that strong participation in some states is at least partly a direct consequence of the choices made by policy makers to broaden access to the polls. The opposite would also be true: the low participation rates observed in places like Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas are partly the result of deliberate efforts by lawmakers to make voting more difficult.

The researchers estimate that even for the participation rate, the same day registration laws would be more profitable.

"We can safely say that if states want higher voter participation rates in elections, a reasonable starting point to start would be a voter registration policy the same day," the researchers conclude. "Reregistration to vote a predetermined number of days before the general election makes voting more expensive. Allowing people to register at the polling station itself would do even more to reduce the cost of voting. "