Abstract
As early voting has become a staple of American elections, empirical studies of its effects have zeroed in on questions related primarily to voter turnout – for example, whether this and other forms of convenience voting increase aggregate turnout (e.g. Burden et al. 2014), and whether such reforms influence the partisan composition of voters (Kaplan and Yuan 2020). Fewer studies, however, have drilled down on the ways in which early voting affects elections themselves.
In this paper, we present two studies that speak to the interaction between early voters and late voters emerging from early voting reforms. First, using a sample from the 2020 CCES, we explore how early and late voters perceive the act of voting early, the benefits and downsides associated with casting an early vote, and the persons who do and do not avail themselves of early voting opportunities. Second, we study the social effects of early voting using an hour-long experiment (conducted in summer 2021) that combined a DPTE-style campaign experience with a small-group deliberation in which information from the campaign was shared among participants.