The Efficacy of Registration Drives

Abstract

This paper compares the voting rates of those who are enrolled by registration drives in comparison to the rates of those who register themselves. The central question is whether the return from registration drives in terms of the number of voters they yield is worth the effort? In addition, the paper looks at the demographic profile of the group-registered voters to discover how they differ from self-registered individuals. The data set consists of 108,653 individuals in Los Angeles County who registered between the 1980 and 1982 elections. The results indicate that 41% of those registered by registration drives actually voted as compared to 57% of the self-registered. It also appears that the group-registered voters are younger and more frequently minority.

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