Florida early Vote results

Florida Senate election, 2012 (Wikimedia)

From the, written by, University of Florida

Access to the ballot has expanded over the course of American history — but voting rights are also reversed from time to time. One of the most abrupt reversals occurred in Florida in 2011. Backed by Republican Governor Rick Scott, the state legislature reduced the number of early voting days from 14 to eight and eliminated in-person voting on the final Sunday before the Tuesday election. This change of course for ballot access was far from a nonpartisan move. As chair of the Florida GOP Jim Greer later explained, the “Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants … firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates.”

Did things turn out as the party honchos expected? Drawing on multiple slices of official statewide voter files, my colleague Michael Herron and I analyzed whether the retrenchment of early voting had differential effects for different groups of Florida voters. Our results indicate that shrinking the early voting period worked as its architects apparently intended. Early voting by minorities went down in 2012, and voters who had cast ballots on the final Sunday of early voting in 2008 ended up with especially low participation in the 2012 general election.

Early voting by blacks and Hispanics

• Black Floridians are heavy users of the early voting option. Blacks made up about 13% of Florida’s registered voter pool in 2008 and almost 14% in 2012, yet in both elections they made up about 22% of the early voters.
• The percentage of all voters who used early voting dropped more sharply for minorities than for whites from 2008 to 2012. For blacks, the early voting share dropped from 35.7% to 31.6%; and for Hispanics, the early voting share dropped from 19.9% to 15.3%. But for whites, the early voting share went down only slightly from 18.5% to 17.6%.