(from left to right) Molly Welch; Joanna Bell; Dasha Metropolitansky; Eneida Tavares, Chair, City of Boston Board of Election Commissioners; Emily Quinn, City of Boston Marketing Coordinator; and Paul Rosenboom.
In the city of Boston, only one in six registered voters vote in municipal elections—a participation rate almost four times lower than state and federal elections. What’s driving that disparity? And what can the city government do to address it?
That’s the challenge we’re setting out to solve as part of Tech and Innovation in Government, a Harvard field class where students use user-centered design to solve government problems.
Our team and challenge
We’re a group of five students with a range of backgrounds, including technology, international development, and civic engagement.
Joanna Bell is a Masters in Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School with a background in digital literacy and interest in municipal government.
Dasha Metropolitansky studies statistics (the data science track) and computer science at Harvard College and is interested in predictive analytics and game theory.
Sunaina Pumadarthy is a Masters in Public Policy student at the Kennedy School, who has previously worked on elections campaigns in India.
Paul Rosenboom is a Mid-Career Masters in Public Administration student at the Kennedy School, who previously worked in aerospace and the Peace Corps Madagascar.
Molly Welch is a joint Masters in Public Policy and Masters in Business Administration student at the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School who previously worked on marketing and public policy at Google.
Over the next two months, we’ll be working with the City of Boston’s Board of Election Commissioners to increase resident turnout in local municipal elections.
Historically, the City has seen between 11% and 16% of registered voters participate in municipal elections. It’s a stark comparison to the approximately 75% of registered voters that generally turn out for federal elections. The City is eager to increase resident participation in municipal elections.
Understanding the problem
To begin, we sought to develop a deeper understanding of the problem. What do Boston residents think about local government and municipal elections? What influences their voting behavior?
We spoke with seven public transit riders on the MBTA train and asked them about their voting behavior and perception of municipal government. As we learned more about why people vote, it became clear that the quality of the relationship between the voter and the City mattered.
The people we spoke to who voted in local elections knew what to expect from their city government and why the government was important to them. The people who didn’t vote felt disconnected and couldn’t think of a reason why they would even call the city. Several individuals mentioned the city was “not accessible” to them. One resident mentioned that she wasn’t sure what city government does.
We also found that the longer a person lived in Boston, the more likely they were to have voted. Though our sample was too small to establish generalizable conclusions, we consistently saw that interview subjects who had lived in their communities for over a year were more likely to vote than newcomers. We also found that friends and family matter: many interviewees indicated that their social circles were influential in their decision to vote.
With these insights, along with information from our partners at the City of Boston about their objectives, we framed our focus this semester: “How might we increase voter participation in municipal elections for the City of Boston?”
What’s next?
Our initial qualitative research with Boston residents gave us some working hypotheses about perceptions of voting and barriers to voting. Next, we plan to analyze historical voting patterns across the city to see how turnout varies across precincts and polling places.
We also want to speak with more Boston residents. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be conducting more interviews in different parts of the city. We’ve also developed an online survey about voting behavior that we plan to broadly disseminate.
Finally, we’re planning on connecting with individuals and groups with direct access to communities of voters, including Neighborhood Liaisons and voter advocacy groups. We hope these groups will expand our understanding of barriers to voting and share more about potential solutions with which they’ve already experimented.
It’s going to be an exciting semester as we work to improve Boston residents’ engagement with local government! Ultimately, we hope to develop recommendations for the Boston Board of Election Commissioners. We’re also lucky that we’ll be able to witness the upcoming local election, which will give us a chance to see the electoral process in action.
We’ll be sharing updates along the way. If you’re interested in learning more, follow along on our course blog.
Joanna Bell, Dasha Metropolitansky, Sunaina Pumadarthy, Paul Rosenboom, Molly Welch