How Lazy are Voters?

From my awesome electoral mapper. Turnout by electoral division in the 2015 Democratic primary.  Yellow is < 14%, while Purple is > 30%.  Pretty anemic, right?

Voters get a bad rep for being lazy or apathetic.  But are they really? (A: Yes, as we'll see.)

As Philadelphia's primary primaries are coming up on May 21, I thought I would do a quick calculation about voter turnout.  In Philly, the primary is the election, since the city is so heavily Democratic, and in odd years, we pick candidates for city council and mayor, so there's a lot on the line.  Nevertheless, turnouts are typically on the order of only 20-30% of registered Democratic voters.  The map above show's turnout in the last such election, broken down by electors divisions.  My own, the 30th Ward, 7th division, had a measly 27.3% turnout.

Rather than just berate people about voting, my question is this:

Does proximity to the polling place affect how likely voters are to turn out?

 The approach is pretty straightforward.  For the last 8 Philadelphia primaries, I looked at the full voter export* and computed the fraction of recent primaries that each voter in my sample participated in, and how far they live from their polling place.  That's it.  What I found was intuitively sensible, but still kind of surprising:

People who live within about 100m (roughly a block) from a polling place are about 20% more likely to vote.

That is a big effect.  By comparison, the turnout in 2018 (a midterm year!) was about 50%, and in 2016 (a presidential year) was 60%, so the difference of living within a block of the polling place is roughly the same as going from a midterm turnout level to a presidential turnout level.

This increase is true for younger voters, older voters, pretty much everyone.  The blue dots show the results overall.  Across Philadelphia, people who live within 100m of the polls voted 32% of the time, while the rest of the voters came out about 27% of the time (fractionally, a 19% bump).   For older folks (over 65), the bump was only about 7%, while for the youngs, the increase was about 14%.  It's really the middle folks (including, people in my demographic) who are driving this laziness effect.

The point, for now, is just to point out the effect.  On the other hand, if the party, or candidates, want to use this as an opportunity to motivate somewhat more reluctant voters, that'd be swell, too.




* Basically a database of every voter in the county, where they live, and which elections they voted in -- pretty detailed, and a little creepy, but yours for $20 from the state.