A new article in the American Political Science Review by four graduate students at Harvard University uses a creative field experiment to show that local election officials are less likely to respond to informational inquiries from individuals with “putatively Latino names.”

In the article, titled “What Do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials”, the authors describe the results of a large (N=6825) contact efforts, spread across 46 states. The emails contained requests for information about voting or about requirements for a voter ID and are fairly generic:

The text of the voter ID email was as follows:
Hello,
I’ve been hearing a lot about voter ID laws on the news.
What do I need to do to vote?
Thank you,
(Jose Martinez, Jake Mueller, Luis Rodriguez, or Greg
Walsh)

The control email was as follows:
Hello,
I’ve been wondering about this. Do you have to vote in
the primary election to be allowed to vote in the general
elections?
Thank you,
(Jose Martinez, Jake Mueller, Luis Rodriguez, or Greg
Walsh)

These are fairly
generic emails, but there was a statistically significant lower probability of receiving any response and receiving an informative response for those emails sent from names that appeared to be Latino.  See the table for the key results (click on the image for a larger view).

The authors are quick to note that this is not an article about election officials per se, but about discretion provided to “street level bureaucrats” in implementing laws and regulations.  However, they also note that this may raise concerns about the impact of voter ID laws on specific populations.

For interested readers, the full abstract is below:

Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of different putative ethnicities. Emails sent from Latino aliases are significantly less likely to receive any response from local election officials than non-Latino white aliases and receive responses of lower quality. This raises concerns about the effect of voter ID laws on access to the franchise and about bias in the provision of services by local bureaucrats more generally.