Campus Voting During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

How did the pandemic impact turnout of young voters living in university communities? Leveraging the mandatory vacating of Florida college students living on campuses and drawing on administrative data from Florida’s voter file, we argue that on-campus registered young voters who had to leave their university housing in the days prior to Florida’s 2020 Presidential Preference Primary (PPP) were less likely to turn out compared to adjacent off-campus young voters because they lost the opportunity to cast early in-person and Election Day ballots. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, we find that on-campus students, in part because they had early and Election Day voting available to them on campus in the 2020 general election, were more likely than comparable off-campus student-aged registered voters to cast ballots in the November election. Our study has important implications for academic debates concerning the turnout effects of convenience voting reforms and the ability of voters to cast ballots prior to Election Day.