In our last post, we found that early voting spans the gamut from no early voting at all (like Alabama and New Hampshire), to 46+ days (like South Dakota, Minnesota and Pennsylvania).
But concluded that the real question is:
How much time is the right amount of time for early voting?
Like any good business problem, there’s multiple ways you can analyze it. In this instance you could measure market supply and demand, or building issue trees to understand every aspect of the behavior and operation, or policy folk might choose a traditional cost-benefit analysis. To keep it simple for today’s purposes, let’s look at this in a simplified view of comparables. Comparables is often used when estimating the value of a company, where you look at similar companies to estimate the appropriate metrics to apply to your own company. In our case, today, we’re going to look at two basic criteria, one for the citizen, and one for the government.
The citizen’s needs
The average citizen’s life is busy, whether you are working parents trying to keep the food on the table for your family, or a young aspirational professional burning the night oil trying to get ahead. No matter who you are, you have to complete key tasks every week, month or year. They come in different flavors and from different organizations. The DMV requires you to renew your license and the bank requires you to pay your mortgage. In any situation, you are probably accustomed to certain norms around getting those things done and how much time you get to accomplish those tasks.
We compiled a list of comparable government activities, like responding to a jury summons, updating your address after moving and paying your mortgage and found similar average expectations to complete these tasks.
Chart of Comparable activities and their typical, min/max grace period:
Activity | Avg | Min | Max |
Renewing Drivers License | 30 | 30 | 90 |
Renewing Business License | 30 | 10 | 60 |
Response to Jury Summons | 20 | 10 | 30 |
Car Emmissions | 15 | 0 | 30 |
Responding to Court Citation | 22 | 14 | 30 |
Proof of Insurance after a Traffic Stop | 12.5 | 10 | 15 |
Updating Address on Legal Documents after Moving | 45 | 30 | 60 |
Filing for Unemployment | 10.5 | 7 | 14 |
Mortgage Payment | 12.5 | 10 | 15 |
Phone Bill | 7.5 | 5 | 10 |
Utility | 11 | 7 | 15 |
Credit Card Bill | 23 | 21 | 25 |
Unsurprisingly, the average government task came with a much longer grace periods, on average than their corporate counterparts (see chart below). However, Early Voting grace periods measured much closer to corporate comparables on (and below) average, than it’s government peer grace periods. On average, early voting durations were about 8 days less than the average government grace period,
Chart comparing Early Voting Duration Quartiles with Average Comparable Activity Grace Period
Corp Comps | Early Voting | Gov Comps | |
Low end | 11 | 12 | 14 |
Average | 14 | 15 | 23 |
High end | 16 | 28 | 41 |
Practically, residents in states like South Dakota, Minnesota, Virginia, Mississippi, and Illinois get as much time to vote as they do to update legal documents with a new address or renew their drivers license, and therefore can fit it into their busy days with less stress. Meanwhile, residents living in Alabama, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Florida, Delaware or Maryland have as much time as their Phone or Utility bill payment before they fear service disconnection – making it practically a more stressful activity.
The voting operation
The government operation behind our elections is not trivial. There’s massive amounts of state and local coordination required that vary based on the size of your state’s geography, population and funding, and one might expect states to offer more early voting to accommodate more complex needs. However, the bottom line conclusion here: There’s zero good explanation in the data for why some states have more/less early voting than others.
Operationally, you would expect that larger states in terms of population, landmass or GDP need a longer early vote duration to accommodate a more complex civic landscape. However, there is an extremely low correlation between any of these variables, which you can see in the charts below. No linear modeling of these factors (including partisan leaning), provide any explanatory significance (economic or statistical) to the early voting duration. Technically, Democrat leaning states offer their citizens ~1.5 days more early voting than Republicans, but it's statistically insignificant and means little when comparing 14 vs 15.5 days of early voting. In the chart below, (or in our previous blog post here), you can see that early voting isn’t partisan at all – many states of both Republican or Democrat lean are over/under investing in early voting.
The obvious callouts here include: Texas, New York and Florida, which provide less early voting than their citizens need, given the geographic size, population and funding available to make it happen.
Conclusion
People generally don’t have as much time to vote as they probably need. Half of US states provide less time to early vote then their bank gives them to pay their mortgage. Further, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason behind this. Some states are wise to give their citizens more time, while others don’t see it as a priority and that doesn’t seem to be driven by the factors we’d expect – operationally or politically.
If you're in a state with less time to vote than you have to pay your mortgage, or worse, your phone bill or utility, call your representative and tell them. Don’t have the time? GetInformNation.com and find the Trending Card stating “My state allows me sufficient time to vote early.” and speak your mind.
Sources and Acknowledgements:
The data from this analysis was reconciled from vote.org and the usvotefoundation.org with population data from the US Census, land data from wikipedia, gdp data from NBER. Data on non-voting activities was gathered from ChatGPT and spot checked for accuracy.