Crowding at the ballot box: Germ aversion and voting methods in the 2020 U.S. general election

Abstract

In 2020, the growing COVID‐19 pandemic threatened engagement with the U.S. presidential election. Did this threat affect how people perceived the voting process and the means by which they voted? Four months before the election, 564 participants in several states viewed slideshows framing the pandemic primarily as a health or economic threat, then rated their impressions of voting environments and their attitudes about various voting methods. Following the general election, these data were matched to records indicating if and how participants voted. Exposure to the health consequences of COVID‐19 led people to judge socially dense polling places more negatively but had few effects on other voter outcomes. Instead, chronic aversion to germs predicted more negative responses to dense polling places as well as support for, and use of, socially distanced voting methods, even when accounting for other relevant factors such as partisanship and local COVID‐19 rates.