The Early Voting Information Center
We are a non-partisan academic research center based at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Professor Paul Gronke and his team conduct research on early voting and election reform, predominantly in the United States. In addition to our scholarly research, we have worked on projects with the Pew Center on the States, the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the Center for American Progress and a number of state and local elections offices.
The Early Voting Information Center is proud to have co-hosted the inaugural Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference in July of 2017. More information can be found on the conference website.
Professor Gronke's academic credentials--including his curriculum vita, courses taught, and other research papers--can be found at his personal Reed web page.
- Research Analyst: Brian Hamel, PhD student, UCLA Dept. of Political Science.
- Assistant: Laura Swann, Reed College ('19).
- Research Coordinator: Mia Leung, Reed College ('19).
Important new paper by Alan Gerber, Gregory Huber, and Seth Hill estimates the effects of moving to an all vote-by-mail system in the State of Washington.
The overall estimated impact of the change to VBM is 2.6% in presidential years, 3.3% in midterm years, and 3.8% in odd years, very close to estimates I’ve provided before (see here for an estimate based on national data and here for Oregon estimates).
Using individual level voter files, they find even larger effects on low propensity voters: 9.8 percentage points for those in the file who were only registered to vote at a polling place in 2008, followed by a 3.8 percentage point increase for those who did not vote in 2006, 7, and 8.
The piece is a nice empirical demonstration of how to work with individual voter history files as a way to evaluate an election reform, and it’s also nice to see that the oft-quoted “2-4% effect” (mostly coming out of my mouth) is sustained once again.