The Direct Cost to Voters of Polling Site Closures and Consolidation

Restrictive voting laws are an increasingly salient and contested feature of American politics. Yet estimating their unbiased and direct impact on voter turnout is challenging, given the strategic and often simultaneous actions of political actors who can both impose and mitigate the costs of these laws. Using individual-level data from Davidson County, Tennessee, we leverage variation induced by an early-morning tornado on Super Tuesday 2020 to estimate the direct causal effect of polling-site closures and consolidations on voter turnout. We find that moving to a new polling station decreases in-person turnout by 5.65 percentage points, on average, and that the variable cost of moving --- proxied by change in travel distance --- drives almost all of this decrease. Additionally, voting at a consolidated site only decreases turnout when the number of individuals assigned to a given station increases by more than 100\%. This finding suggests prolonged wait times and overcrowding may also dampen in-person turnout