Decreasing Hurdles and Increasing Registration Rates for College Students: An Online Voter Registration Systems Field Experiment

Abstract

States have adopted online voter registration in the past few years to save on data entry costs and increase voter turnout. In 2010 when online voter registration was newly introduced in eight states, we conducted a field experiment with 25 colleges involving more than 130,000 unregistered students designed to increase awareness of the new registration tool. Students were randomly assigned to receive an email linking to the new registration portal, receive an email linking to the older downloadable registration form, or a control group that received no email about voter registration. Student registry data was then checked against voter files to look at relative rates of registration and voter turnout across treatment conditions. We estimate that linking to the downloadable form increased registration rates by 0.6 percentage points and did not affect turnout rates at all. In contrast, emails linking to the online registration portal increased registration rates by 1.2 percentage points and turnout rates by 0.5 percentage points, which are large effects relative to other mobilization techniques.