Measuring Voter Equity at the Local Level

A basic premise of democracy is that all citizens have an equal opportunity to participate in governance via the ballot. Decades of research have shown that electoral access is inequitable even if it is equal—meaning that while most have the right to vote, some face greater barriers than others. One of the challenges in assessing the degree of electoral equity in the United States is that the country does not have a single electoral system; instead, it consists of multiple systems at the state and local levels. The local level of election administration is a critical aspect of the U.S. electoral system, with important implications for voter access. Voting access varies widely within states depending on service provision by local election officials. To better understand the role of local election administration and its impact on voters, we develop a novel, empirically grounded tool for measuring local-level voter access: the Measure of Voter Equity (MOVE) index. To construct this measure, we conducted an intensive pilot data collection project at the county level in two states—Arizona and Nevada. We find that rural counties in both states have significantly lower levels of access. The MOVE index, along with its subcomponent scores, offers a comprehensive measure of voting access at the local level that can be used by scholars and policy practitioners to more precisely assess electoral equity.