Week 6 - Campus Community

Hey everyone!

What I’ve learned so far is that, when it comes to the final act of voting at the polls, location is everything. A lack of accessibility or transportation costs can deter too many interested individuals. Young individuals often cite inconvenient location as a barrier to voting (CIRCLE, 2019). And as the Fair Elections Center points out, college campus polling sites are an opportunity to fix this, yet in 2020, 74% of campuses did not have any in-person voting options.

In Week 6, I worked to study how the availability of on-campus polling sites impacted voter turnout. As I began, I realized how different it was from the Same-Day and Automatic Voter Registration legislation I studied beforehand. First, the National Conference of State Legislatures was my primary source for SDVR and AVR data, with well-organized start times for legislation and descriptions of their nuances, whether they changed over the years, and more. Finding exact start years for on-campus poll sites was much harder, and the process drew from multiple sources. Second, instead of comparing whole states to each other, I’m comparing similar colleges (one treatment and one control).

Methodology

While researching, I found fewer real papers on this subject, but to help me narrow down my method, I read what factors make a college most similar to each other. These factors include their type (public, private, community college, etc.), tuition cost, highest degree awarded, and student-faculty ratio. For the most part, I was able to find this data from a source called College Scorecard. Next, I began grouping similar colleges by clustering them, a method based in the same principles of calculating each point’s distance to each other.

As of now, I’ve determined similar colleges in the states without AVR or SDVR at any time (to control for the effects of those legislation). However, adding the data for when each college began on-campus polling was more of a manual process I was only able to do for a few states, and instead of a clear start date, the source gave a two year range (ex. between 2025 and 2026). Now, I’m trying to find a better solution to the issue and be able to draw comparisons for more colleges in more states.