mail: Philadelphia experiment on mail-in voting
In PPBDS/primer.data: Data for Preceptor's Primer for Bayesian Data Science

mail	R Documentation

Philadelphia experiment on mail-in voting

Description

This data is from a paper entitled Results from a 2020 field experiment encouraging voting by mail. See also the 'Details' section below. The aim of the study was to understand how facilitating mail ballot requests affects their use. A total of over 935,000 registered voters in Philadelphia were randomly assigned to either a control group or one of two treatment groups. The results combine information on voting behavior with voter's demographic background.

Usage

mail

Format

A tibble with 935,707 observations and 11 variables:

treatment: character variable indicating which of the 3 treatments was employed before the 2020 primary election: 'No Postcard', 'Self', or 'Neighborhood'
voted: character variable for whether respondent voted
voted_mail: character variable for whether respondent voted by mail
applied_mail: character variable for whether respondent applied for a mail ballot
applied_date: date variable for the date that respondent's mail ballot application was received
voted_date: date variable for the date that respondent's mail ballot was received
party: character variable for respondent's party registration
age: factor variable for respondent's age group
sex: character variable for respondent's sex
pred_white: double variable for likelihood of respondent being white based on their name
pred_black: double variable for likelihood of respondent being black based on their name

Details

Pennsylvania's primary election took place on 2 June, 2020. Two weeks before the election, on 18 May 2020, a group of randomly selected registrants in Philadelphia received postcards with information about applying to vote by mail. This was the first statewide federal election held since Pennsylvania adopted universal access to mail ballots, so information about how to apply was particularly likely to increase awareness of voting by mail.

Registrants were sent one of two postcards about mail ballots or no postcard. The postcards conveyed information about the 26 May deadline to request a mail ballot and included a message either encouraging voters to request a ballot because “it’s safer for you to vote by mail!” or “it’s safer for neighborhood to vote by mail!”. In all, 23,475 registered voters were assigned to the “self” condition and 23,485 to the “neighborhood” condition, with the remaining 888,785 in the control condition receiving no postcard.