University action in reducing the costs of voting

This week, I published an op-ed in the Cavalier Daily about obstacles to student voting. In it, I critiqued the UVA administration for not doing enough to support student civic engagement and voting. I called for UVA to work to overcome many of the obstacles to student voting by providing increased resources and and scheduling in order to reduce the costs, especially the opportunity cost, of voting.

In arguing for the university administration to remove obstacles to voting in the piece, what I am arguing for is a reduction in in the costs of voting. In other words, by making it easier to register to vote, get to the polls, request an absentee ballot, and learn about the candidates, the costs that go into the process of casting a ballot are reduced, without affecting anticipated benefits.

[Of course it may be noted that benefits may be affected if the reduced costs of voting increase the number of students who go to the polls. Assuming students are more likely to vote for one candidate than another, this may increase the individual student’s probability of casting the tie-breaking vote if that candidate were likely to lose without an increase in student votes, causing a reduction in benefit. On the other hand, as more students go to the polls, social pressures might increase, given the diverse and interwoven friend groups at universities, causing an increase in benefit from voting.]

What does this mean? According to Johnson, very little. His comparison of the costs of voting with the anticipated benefits weighs the costs so heavily that a small decrease in costs will likely not reduce them enough to be less than or equal to the expected benefits (given cost was previously greater than benefit). However, assuming a heterogeneous distribution of voting preferences (differing costs and benefits) across the student body, university action to reduce costs of voting may affect “edge cases” – or those whose costs were formerly only slightly higher than the benefits – causing them to vote when they formerly would not have because costs are reduced below benefits. In effect, the changes I argue for might result in several more students voting because their benefits are now equal to or greater than the costs of voting.