The 2020 Pandemic and Voter Registration
By: Skyler Williams
At the start of the pandemic in 2020 we saw the closure of nearly every part of our lives: schools closed, jobs closed, and even all levels of government that were non-essential closed. Included in these closures were places that people would typically get registered to vote. As the pandemic progressed, we saw a wide variance in the level of precautions that cities and counties were taking to protect their citizens from COVID-19. Majority Democratic counties tended to have more closures and overall precautions in place while majority Republican counties tended to open the city up earlier and have less restrictions in place. Due to the different timelines of reopening, citizens across the state had different resources when it came to performing actions such as registering to vote. This variance of timelines allowed for a gap in voter registration numbers to be present, which can have an impact on elections at the time of the gap as well as future elections. When a person is not able to register when they would have intended, it can prevent them from building a habit of voting which will impact their voter participation in years to come.
This research is vital because it will offer insight into how the pandemic impacted access to voter registration, which was commonly overlooked by the question of how the pandemic impacted the ability to vote. However, when we only consider how the pandemic impacted the ability to vote we are ignoring new voters’ ability to vote and people who allowed their registration to expire, which are both vital to elections as well.
As a part of my research into this topic I looked at the total voter registration by county for 2019, 2020, and 2021. Through this I found that the total voter registration in Texas increased between 2019 and 2020 but then slightly decreased between 2020 and 2021. The increase and then decrease could be due to a multitude of reasons, but it is likely due to 2020 being an election year while 2021 was not, meaning that people are not as pressured to register (Figure 1). The next part that I evaluated was a comparison of the voter registration numbers in majority Republican and majority Democrat counties by year. Through this I found that the numbers remained consistent throughout the three years. Each year, the percentage of registered voters from majority Republican counties remained 44% compared to the 66% from majority Democrat counties (Figures 2, 3, and 4). The final piece of data that I evaluated was a comparison of the total voter registration from all three years and the percent of those voters that were from majority Democratic counties. From this comparison I found that the total voter registration increase between 2019 and 2020 and then the slight decrease between 2020 and 2021 was consistent with the percentages that were from majority Democratic counties (Figure 5).
The presentation of this data raises the question of what does it all mean? Essentially my findings were that the majority party affiliation of the county had no impact on voter registration based on the data. This could be explained by the fact that no matter the obstacles people were motivated to vote because it was a presidential election year or that people had more time to perform activities like registering to vote because so many jobs were moved online. Whatever the explanation is, it is clear that with the data available there was no direct impact on the voter registration numbers. Therefore, one could argue that there was no impact on the 2020 election due to the pandemic. Voters were able to register and vote at usual rates, meaning that our election was not negatively impacted by the pandemic!
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Sources:
The Texas Tribune. Here Are the 2020 Election Results
https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/general-election-results/
The Secretary of State. January 2019 Voter Registration Figures
https://www.sos.texas.gov/elections/historical/jan2019.shtml
The Secretary of State. January 2020 Voter Registration Figures
https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/funds/chapter-19/voter-reg-application-statistics.shtml
The Secretary of State. January 2021 Voter Registration Figures
https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/jan2021.shtml
