Maintaining the Machinery of Democracy: Assessing the Impact of Spending on Voting Equipment on Turnout

Underlying the concerns of local election officials about the state of their voting equipment is the notion that voting technology has a substantial impact on the quality of American elections. Voting equipment can quite literally be considered the machinery of democracy. Therefore it is important to understand the relationship between the quality of voting equipment on electoral participation. This paper examines the impact of differences in voting system value on county-level turnout. I argue that investing in voting systems benefits all voters, but especially voters with special needs (like disabled and limited English proficient (LEP) voters). Given the diminished capacity of federal funding provided to localities, there is variability in the amount of resources available to localities to spend on voting equipment. I find evidence suggesting that counties that invest more resources into voting equipment have higher levels of turnout than those that invest less, all else being equal. Higher value voting systems were associated with marginally higher turnout rates for counties with larger proportions of visually disabled and LEP populations.