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We closed 645 polling places due to Covid-19. That cost us 19,000 votes.

How many votes were lost due to polling place closures?

In response to the unprecedented pandemic, City Commissioners consolidated polling places ahead of the 2020 Primary. Instead of the 832 polling places in the 2019 Primary, voters were only given 188. The result is that voters in many Divisions had to travel farther to vote on Election Day (if they voted in person). How many votes did that cost us?

NOTE: I want to say up front that the City closing polling places may have been the optimal decision among bad choices. The election took place in the heart of the pandemic, and I am not claiming that there was a better strategy, with shortages of poll workers and many existing polling places not able to support social distancing. But we can, in retrospect, use the consolidation to understand the importance of polling place location, and make sure we do better in November.

Data note 1: I’m filtering out Divisions whose boundaries have changed since 2019.

The median distance from a Division’s centroid to its polling place more than doubled this election, from 0.16 miles in the 2019 Primary to 0.37 in 2020.

What happened to turnout in places where the distances greatly changed?

Data note 2: I compare distance to polling place in 2020 to that of 2019, but will compare turnout in 2020 to that of 2016. Because polling places were very stable over time until this year, that’s not a big deal. To whatever extent the distances in 2016 were different from 2019, that’ll cause attenuation in my estimates, meaning the turnout changes due to distances are actually larger than what I state.

First, how far did polling places move? The most common distance in 2019 was between 0.10-0.25 miles, comprising 827 Divisions. Among those, 540 had their polling place moved to more than a 0.25 mile distance in 2020. In total, of the 1,655 Divisions I’m considering, 1,304 had to travel farther in 2020 than in 2019, and 660 had the distance increase by more than 1/4 mile.

Among Divisions that were close to their polling place in 2019, there was a fall-off in voting when they were moved farther away in 2020. For example, among Divisions that stayed within 0.1 miles in both 2019 and 2020, 2020 turnout was 93% of 2016. But among the 148 Divisions that moved from within 0.1 mile away to only within 0.5 miles away, turnout was 83% of 2016 turnout.

That fall was smaller than it could have been, and was mitigated by voters strategically using mail-ins. Among the Divisions that moved farther away, in-person voting fell sharply, but mail-in voting rose to somewhat counteract the decline. Among the Divisions that stayed within 0.1 miles, for example, in-person turnout was 55.2% of 2016 turnout, and mail-in votes were 37.4% of 2016 turnout (giving the 93% from above). But among those that moved from within 0.1 miles to within only 0.5 miles, in-person turnout was 39%, and mail-in only rose to 44%.

I’ve shown before that mail-in voting had strong differences by voting bloc. And those played out sharply in how distance changed turnout.

Black Voter Divisions showed the strongest fall-off when Divisions were moved farther away, with some evidence of mail-in mitigating the gap. Wealthy Progressives also showed some fall-off, though they heavily used mail-in voting everywhere. Hispanic North Philly Divisions, on the other hand, showed the lowest use of mail-in ballots (Notice that this is even as a fraction of 2016 votes! And in 2016 they were already among the lowest turnout.)

There are two important things that the above analysis doesn’t account for: differences in where races were competitive, and uncertainty. To explore that, I fit a regression with state house district fixed effects, and bootstrap the polling places to provide clustered uncertainty.

The plot below shows the percentage point difference in (turnout 2020 / turnout 2016) between a Division in a given distance bucket and the Divisions that were in the (0,0.1] bucket in both 2016 and 2020.

For example, a Division that was within 0.1 miles in 2016 but moved to within only 0.25 miles in 2020 saw in-person turnout (relative to 2016) 7.7 percentage points lower than a Division that stayed at 0.1 miles.

There are two caveats with this analysis. First, using fixed effects means I can’t differentiate by voting bloc; there aren’t enough districts with multiple voting blocs in them. Second, it assumes that the Commissioners were not anticipating which Divisions would vote disproportionately and choosing the exact placement of the polls accordingly. This strikes me as a reasonable assumption, controlling for state house district, but I can’t prove it.

So how many votes did moving polling places cause? For each polling place, I calculate what the votes would have been using the 2019 distance, instead of the 2020 distance. (This assumes full causality of the coefficients. For instance, it assumes that in no way were the polling places moved in anticipation of how votes would disproportionately fall.)

Among the Divisions we’re considering, there were 378K votes in the 2016 primary, and 332K votes in the 2020 primary (mail-ins and in-person combined). Moving each Divisions to its 2019 distance, we would have seen 351K votes (with a 95% confidence interval of 340K-365K).

Looking ahead to November

Who knows what Covid-19 will look like in November. We may be in the heart of a second wave, and voting in person may bear significant risk. But closing polling places costs votes. It’s incumbent on us to figure out how to keep as many polls open, and to increase the use of mail-in voting to help voters better adapt to a sparse polling place world.

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The Difference between Mail-In and In-Person Voters

This was Pennsylvania’s first election with no-excuse mail-in voting. Thanks to Covid-19, a whopping 140,393 mail-in votes were recorded, out of a total turnout of 348,740. That use of mail-in wasn’t uniform, though. It was dominated by what I’ve called the Wealthy Progressive Divisions.

Overall, the 349K votes cast fell just short of 2016. Among those 349K voters, there were 330K votes cast for a presidential candidate. That compares to 395K votes cast in 2016. (I don’t have the Public Count for 2016, which is why I’m focusing on votes cast for president.)

West Philly’s 188th

As you’d expect, the turnout was higher in wards with competitive State Senate and House races. Slightly more surprising, the mail-in votes looked very different from the in-person. Consider West Philly’s PA-188, where Rick Krajewski beat incumbent Jim Roebuck.

Krajewski won 34.5% of the 5,419 votes cast on Election Day, to Roebuck’s 29.4%. But he won 56.6% of the 6,404 mail-in ballots that would eventually be counted, and Roebuck only 24.8%.

That difference was a function of two things: high-mail-in Divisions were more likely to support Krajewski, but also even within a Division, mail-in voters were more likely to support Krajewski than in-person voters.

This correlation between Krajewski’s vote share and mail-in support is probably because (a) Krajewski’s support was strongest among the left, gentrified Divisions, the same group of people who would vote by mail across the city, but also (b) a concerted effort by the campaign to get their supporters to mail in ballots. My hunch is much more the former than the latter.

But even within Divisions, the mail-in votes were more supportive of Krajewski than the in-person. On average, Krajewski did 3.9 percentage points better on mail-in votes than on in-person votes in the same division (Roebuck did exactly the same on each, Benjamin and Dunn did better on in-person). This may still be a selection effect, where the types of people who mailed in their ballot ahead of time were more likely to support Krajewski. Notice that 3.9 is a tiny fraction of the 22 point difference Krajewski had between mail-in and in-person (56.5 minus 34.5); the other 18 points of the gap was due to the across-division correlation between mail-in votes and where Krajewski performed well.

The race for PA-01

Now consider State Senate PA-01, covering Center City and its North and South.

Saval won 68% of the 16,275 votes cast on Election Day, to Farnese’s 32%. But in this district, 60% of the votes were mail-in, and another 13% were absentee, and they were much closer than the in-person. Saval finished Election Night with a huge lead. As the mail-in votes were counted, the race would become a lot closer.

Saval won only 53% of the mail-in votes, to Farnese’s 47%, and Farnese eked out absentees 50.5 to 49.5. While close, Saval still managed to win mail-ins outright, and certainly avoided losing his Election Night lead.

Saval performed significantly better in the ring around Center City; he won 61% of the vote outside of Center City’s 5th and 8th Wards. He won only 53% of the vote in Center City East’s 5th, and Farnese won 56% of the vote in Center City West’s 8th, the ward he leads. Those regions represented 68%, 16%, and 16% of the districts turnout, respectively.

Within divisions, Saval did 9 percentage points better on in-person votes than he did on mail-in. That’s more than half the 15 point overall difference he had between mail-in and in-person (68 minus 53); the other 6 points come from the fact across divisions in-person turnout correlated with where he did better.

More to come

There are plenty of questions left about how mail-in voters were different from in-person voters, and I’ll do a deep dive once the person-level turnout is released. Stay tuned!