Designing Voter Education Across the States: State Responses to the Help America Vote Act

Abstract

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) incentivized states to invest in voter education and outreach by making federal funds available under the condition that states include a voter education section in their state implementation plans. Since the initial HAVA plans were submitted by all states in 2003, there is notable variation in whether states revised them, and how they evolved. In this article, we offer a descriptive examination of how states designed and revised their voter education plans, and to what extent they met HAVA's core provisions on voter education. We analyze all states' initial HAVA submissions, and track plan revisions between 2004 and 2013. Our findings are consistent with existing scholarly evidence that loosely defined mandates lead to variation in state compliance. States did not uniformly incorporate core HAVA voter education provisions in their initial plans and revisions, and there were differences in the inclusion of education materials for language minority and disabled voters, suggesting limits on compliance with existing federal laws. Variation in the details of states' initial plans and subsequent revisions are explained by whether a given state is covered by the Voting Rights Act as well as state electoral competition. Our findings have implications for understanding how states design voter education policies to ensure that voters have adequate information on how to navigate the election process.