Who Are the Non-Voters?

• Activity Number: 563
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 11:35 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Bingchen Liu* and Lynne Stokes
• Companies: and Southern Methodist University
• Keywords: prediction ; geocoding ; block groups ; matching ; voting ; tract

Abstract

The 2014 midterm election had the lowest turnout in decades. Several states have recently introduced new voter ID laws, and Texas has one of the most stringent in the nation, allowing one of only 7 types of picture ID. The Dallas County Elections office maintains voter registration files that include the address and voting history (i.e.voted or not) of every registered voter in Dallas County. We have obtained these files for analysis and geocoded the addresses to match the census geography in the Census Planning Database (PDB). Then we calculated by tract the current voter registration rate (which can be obtained by utilizing information from the PDB) and the voting rate among registered voters for the last several midterm elections. Our research addresses the following questions: (1) Is the the change in voting rates in recent elections (including 2014) by block-group in Dallas County related to characteristics of the block-groups available from the PDB? (2) Can we predict the block-groups where those who are hard to register or hard to turn out reside? (3) Do the communities in Dallas County that are hard to count and difficulty to turn out to vote have similar characteristics?