B&I Workshop: Ariel White (MIT)

Ariel White (MIT) will present "High-Profile Voter Arrests Reduced Turnout Among Justice-Involved Floridians More Generally."

Abstract
In 2022, Florida state police arrested several dozen people for voting while ineligible due to prior felony convictions. These arrests occurred during a period of widespread uncertainty about voting eligibility for people with convictions. We ask whether these highly-visible arrests might have scared off other apparently-eligible voters with convictions. We use incarceration, probation, and voter-file records to measure turnout among Floridians with past convictions, comparing over-time changes in this group to trends among other voters. We estimate that the arrests reduced the voting rates of formerly-incarcerated Floridians by about 4 percentage points in the August 2022 primary election and 12 percentage points in the November general election, but we do not find evidence of spillover effects to other states.