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Abstract
Since the 1970s, 37 American states have adopted “no-excuse” early voting, a reform allowing any voter to cast ballots before Election Day without providing a reason for doing so. Studies of early voting have predominantly focused on its consequences for voter turnout. There is far less research evaluating its consequences for political actors that have a central interest in laws affecting how citizens vote: campaigns and party organizations. In this dissertation, I argue we should move beyond evaluations of early voting as a reform whose primary consequences are behavioral, considering it also as an institutional reform with implications for the decisions of these political actors. Moreover, I contend we should not expect the responses of political actors to this reform to be the same across place and time, and that these differences matter for the electoral politics.
I use in-depth case studies of six states adopting early voting since the 1970s—Washington, California, Texas, Wyoming, Wisconsin, and Ohio—to show how this reform incentivized adaptation by political actors, and how this adaptation varied across space and over time in ways consequential for the development of electoral politics. Generally, not only did political actors develop innovative and enduring strategies in response to the reform, early voting also inspired new kinds of legal challenges to states’ elections processes. Though these outcomes are observable across cases, the process of adaptation was contingent on the stipulations of early voting in a particular state, the politics of the state in which it was adopted, and the time during which it was adopted. These findings have implications for how we evaluate the effects of voting reforms by expanding our understanding of these changes and their consequences as institutional in nature, with repercussions for the strategic decisions of political actors.
