Early voting may actually depress turnout, researchers say

SALT LAKE CITY — On Wednesday morning, Sam Granato stepped into a Salt Lake County polling station, flashed his driver's license to a clerk, and stepped into the voting booth to cast his ballot.

As the U.S. Senate candidate punched in his selection, news photographers snapped away. It was a decades-old scene common to elections across the country — the media chronicling the moment a significant candidate casts his or her vote.

What made this scene different is that Granato was voting nearly a week before Election Day, something that wasn't possible in Utah until 2006.

That year, 50,897 voters cast early ballots in the general election. For the presidential election in 2008, that number jumped to 275,212, meaning that more than four times as many Utahns cast early votes.

The state doesn't keep track of how much it has spent on early voting (the cost to hire more polling workers is absorbed by individual counties), but data over the past four years suggest that the success of early voting may have changed the nature of Election Day in the state. If nothing else, it could impact the traditional long lines on election night.

But the overall effect of early voting on elections is still unknown. Convential wisdom has suggested that the practice increases overall voter turnout, but new research suggests otherwise — early voting may actually depress voter turnout.

In 2009, four University of Wisconsin professors published a study for the Pew Center on the States about the costs and benefits of early voting and election-day voter registration. On Sunday, two of those professors wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times summarizing the results of last year's study.

"Even with all of the added convenience and easier opportunities to cast ballots," Wisconsin professors Barry C. Burden and Kenneth R. Mayer wrote, "turnout not only doesn't increase with early voting, it actually falls. … Early voting may be the most popular reform sweeping across the states, but it alone is not the key to raising voter turnout."

The Pew study suggests that the best way to increase voter turnout is to allow people to register on Election Day — something only 12 states permitted in 2008. (Utah's registration deadlines are 30 days before the election for registration by mail and 15 days prior to Election Day when registering in person at a county clerk's office.)

BYU political science professor J. Quin Monson is in agreement with the 2009 Pew Study's findings about early voting and election-day registration.