Seo-young Silvia Kim, one of our PhD students at Caltech working on our Monitoring the Election project, has recently posted a really interesting working paper online, “Getting Settled in Your New Home: The Costs of Moving on Voter Turnout.” Silvia’s recently presented this paper at a couple of conferences and in research seminars at a number of universities.

What is the dynamic impact of moving on turnout? Moving depresses turnout by imposing various costs on voters. However, movers eventually settle down, and such detrimental effects can disappear over time. I measure these dynamics using United States Postal Services (USPS) data and detailed voter panel data from Orange County, California. Using a generalized additive model, I show that previously registered voters who move close to the election are significantly less likely to vote (at most -16.2 percentage points), and it takes at least six months on average for turnout to recover. This dip and recovery is not observed for within-precinct moves, suggesting that costs of moving matter only when the voter’s environment has sufficiently changed. Given this, can we accelerate the recovery of movers’ turnout? I evaluate an election administration policy that resolves their re-registration burden. This policy proactively tracks movers, updates their registration records for them, and notifies them by mailings. Using a natural experiment, I find that it is extremely effective in boosting turnout (+5.9 percentage points). This success of a simple, pre-existing, and non-partisan safety net is promising, and I conclude by discussing policy implications.

This is important and innovative work, I highly recommend her paper for readers interested in voter registration and voter turnout. She uses two different methods, one observational and the other causal, to show the reduction in the likelihood of turnout for registered voters who move.