UCLA

Safeguarding democracy in the United States requires ensuring that all citizens are able to vote and have that vote count. However, voter turnout rates by race and age are uneven. Employing a critical race theory approach to the analysis of election administrations for 3,111 counties and county equivalents, three research questions were examined in this study: 1) How do election administration practices cluster across counties; 2) What is the relationship between election administration profiles and overall youth (18 – 29) voter turnout? Does the relationship between election administration profiles and youth voter turnout vary by ethno-racial groups; and 3) To what extent do election administration practice profiles relate to voter turnout rates differently for youth compared to adult voters, within ethno-racial groups?Latent profile analysis was conducted using three-step maximum likelihood estimation. Results indicated three typologies of election administration: 1) Well Administered, characterized by low registration rejections, felony removal, failure to respond removals, and mail ballot rejections rates and low rates of provisional ballots cast); 2) Inadequately Administered, registration rejections and removal rates below the national average, but more than 10 times the rate of the Well Administered typology; and 3) Maladministered, characterized by high rejection rates and high variability across all indicators. A county’s carceral climate, rates of adult incarceration and juvenile institutionalizations, was a significant predictor typology membership. Youth voter turnout was higher in counties with well administered elections compared to the inadequately administered elections, but not maladministered ones. White youth in well administered counties had higher voter turnout than inadequately administered elections, but there were no associations between election administration typology and voter turnout for other ethno-racial groups. The turnout gap between youth and adult voters did not vary across election administration typology overall, yet for Latinx and Asian American Pacific Islanders, the youth-adult gap narrowed because of lower rates of adult voting in maladministered counties. Focusing on how election administration typologies vary across counties provides a pathway to protecting voting rights under state laws and constitutions that guarantee fair elections. For political social workers, understanding the typology of a county’s election aids in tailoring voter engagement strategies.