“People who look like me have died just for registering to vote.”
“I’m trying to make ends meet. I don’t have time to vote.”
“Local elections? All I care about is getting Trump out of office!”
These quotes from Boston residents are reflective of the problem we’re trying to solve—improving participation in local elections. Our team had the opportunity to interview over 60 Boston residents. We also conducted a deep dive into city data, exploring voter turnout and city demographics, to gauge where the real problem lies and ensure our envisioned solutions address the right pain points to increase voter turnout.
Finding Boston voters
We traveled across Boston, on subways, trains, and buses, to locations as diverse as homeless shelters and Super Tuesday polling centers.
For most teams in our DPI-663 class at the Harvard Kennedy School, finding relevant users was a challenge. Our team was lucky in the sense that every person we would run into was a potential “user,” or Boston voter. Moreover, since Super Tuesday occurred during our research phase, we had the opportunity to speak to voters after they cast their vote. With the guidance of the Elections Department, we took to the polls to interview voters, mindful of the many guidelines that govern how outsiders can interact with voters to preserve the integrity of the democratic process. While many Super Tuesday voters were motivated by casting ballots in the Presidential primary, our team collected meaningful insights from these interviewees about Boston’s local elections. Many of the Super Tuesday voters were quite excited to engage with our project!
We decided to target wards and precincts with consistently low voter turnout and those with consistently high turnout so we could understand the differences in these communities and voter behavior across Boston. If you’d like to read more about how we determined which wards and precincts to visit, check out our data analysis work here.
While our qualitative research may not have been representative of the entire voter population in the City of Boston, it was insightful in providing us with feedback on voters’ journey to polls and voters’ relationship with local governance at large. Many of the questions we asked voters revolved around their interaction with and perception of local government, whether they consistently vote in local elections (and why or why not), and whether they consider voting important.
The five target polling stations we chose for Super Tuesday, based on historical voter turnout data. Blue indicates low turnout precincts, and green indicates high turnout.
Molly, Paul and Dasha (from left to right) at one of the polling centers (Ward 21 Precinct 2, Boston University) on Super Tuesday.
Super Tuesday visit to another polling center (Ward 4 Precinct 10, Simmons University)
From this research, we broadly categorized Boston residents into voter and non-voter profiles, or personas, below. Personas enable us to synthesize the results of our interviews and form the basis for potential solution development.
The key takeaway from our field interviews was that the relationship between voters and their local government can be strengthened. Voters need to be convinced that their vote matters and that the city plays a large role in making their daily lives hassle-free. The communication gap is evident; one solution may be that the City of Boston should ramp up efforts to convince residents that casting their ballot can have a concrete impact on the city’s present and future.
Another interesting observation from our weeks of user research is that while residents discover information about the voting process through social media and local websites, networking or person-to-person contact is what gets people to the polling stations. Voting for many is seen as a social activity. Leveraging these “network effects” may also be worth exploring.
Digging into the numbers
Our qualitative research is limited to the users we’re able to access, raising questions of population representativeness. We wanted to supplement our 60+ voter interviews to better understand the scope of the problem.
To tackle this, our team supported our field interviews with quantitative research. We studied voter turnout from 2005 to 2017 and overlaid this analysis with neighborhood-level demographics to try to analyze what was really happening in Boston during local elections.
There were four key take-aways from our quantitative analysis:
Election turnout is much higher in years with mayoral elections (2005, 2009, 2013, 2017) than those with just City Council elections.
Turnout varies widely across Boston’s precincts: there’s anywhere from a 38 to 70 percentage point gap between the lowest turnout precinct and the highest turnout precinct in a given election year.
Low turnout precincts in Boston are consistently low turnout, whereas high turnout precincts are, for the most part, not consistently high turnout. From a policy perspective, we should examine what low turnout areas have in common rather than focusing on features of high turnout areas.
Low turnout areas tend to have any or all of the following features: few people who have lived in the neighborhood for at least a year, a large population, a high poverty rate, and many university students. Note that all of these features are relative to the average Boston precinct.
Check out the full data analysis here. The code and data we used can be found here.
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While we plan to continue with user research, our next step is to test some of the potential solutions our team has developed in the course of interviews and data analysis. In the coming weeks, we will be working closely with the City of Boston to begin prototyping potential interventions. Our goal is to create a series of prototypes through iterations as we continue to gather feedback from the users before we have our final solution laid out.
Stay tuned for updates from our testing and prototype phase!
Note: All of the user research was done before the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Our team is committed to working with the City of Boston and designing solutions with the health of citizens as a top priority. We continue to engage with this project remotely.
Joanna Bell, Dasha Metropolitansky, Sunaina Pumadarthy, Paul Rosenboom, Molly Welch