The weeks leading up to the Wisconsin primary election on April 7 were tumultuous. On March 27 , Democratic Gov. Tony Evers called for every voter in the state to be sent an absentee ballot, but the Republican-controlled legislature rejected the idea.
The weekend before the election, Evers called an emergency session of the legislature, hoping to postpone the election; once again, his efforts were stymied. Evers was also blocked in the courts; the day before the election was to take place, he issued an executive order moving it to June 9, but the state supreme court struck it down. These maneuvers occurred against the backdrop of shortages of electoral resources. On March 31, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described a dire poll worker shortage : Wisconsin was short some 7, poll workers, a situation that led to the consolidation of polling places around the state.
In the rest of Wisconsin, the number of polling places dropped by 11 percent. As the nation prepares for the November general election, we wanted to test whether fewer polling places decreased turnout in Milwaukee, or if voters simply shifted to the vote-by-mail alternative.
Our answer is no. To be clear, a surge in absentee voting may have offset at least a portion of any depressive turnout effects of consolidated polling places: while just , ballots were cast by mail in the presidential primary, ,mail ballots were submitted this year. However, despite this surge in absentee voting, we find that. In order to estimate what turnout out would have been in Milwaukee City if not for the polling place closures, we used a matching model to pair voters in the city with voters outside the city.
We matched each treated voter to two control voters based on whether they voted in the and primaries; their gender, race, partisan affiliation, and ethnicity; their latitude and longitude; and estimates of their household income and education level. The data all come from L2 Political. Controlling for these characteristics is important, because they are highly correlated with whether someone casts a ballot. For instance, 50 percent of all suburban voters voted in the primary, while just 27 percent of Milwaukee voters did so.
