Abstract
Both the academic literature and popular press have speculated as to why voter turnout in the US is so much lower than in other advanced industrialized democracies. One proposed explanation posits that the division of elections for different offices into separate contests held relatively frequently plays a key role. Leveraging a recent reform in California that required consolidation of some municipal elections with statewide elections through a difference-indifferences framework, this paper investigates this hypothesis, finding that election consolidation appeared to raise turnout of registered voters in midterm contests by around three to five percentage points relative to what it would have been in the absence of consolidation. These results suggest that consolidating local elections with the federal general elections in November of even years may be a feasible strategy to address persistently low turnout in both local and national contests.