by Brandon Burley and The Redemption Project
Decades of research point to no single cure for low turnout. People are more likely to participate when voting is easier, elections offer meaningful choices, the consequences are visible and someone gives them a reason to believe showing up matters.
Tennessee has an interesting voting problem.
Some of the state’s most competitive elections happen when relatively few people are watching.
In recent election cycles, most of Tennessee’s closest state and federal races have occurred in August primaries rather than November general elections. Yet turnout in August elections has historically averaged about 33.4 percentage points lower than in November.
That should complicate one of our easiest assumptions about voting.
People do not automatically participate because an election is important.
Sometimes the election can be consequential, competitive and capable of deciding who actually holds office — and most registered voters still stay home.
So what does get people to vote?
After decades of field experiments, election studies and turnout research, the answer appears to be less dramatic than most political arguments suggest.
There is no single switch.
But there are several levers.
First, remove unnecessary friction
Before asking why someone did not vote, it helps to ask how difficult the system made participation.
Registration is one of the clearest examples.
A 2023 study in the American Political Science Review examined voters who moved within Orange County, California. Some had their voter-registration addresses automatically updated because of when they moved; others had to handle the process themselves.
Automatic reregistration increased turnout by 5.8 percentage points.
Another randomized experiment involving more than 25,000 college students tested something even simpler.
Students in selected classrooms received short presentations explaining registration and were given an opportunity to complete the process.
Registration rose by about 6 percentage points.
Actual voting rose by about 2.6 percentage points.
Neither experiment turned disengaged people into political junkies.
They made participation easier.
That distinction matters.
Sometimes the barrier is philosophical.
Sometimes it is paperwork.
You do not need to change someone’s worldview if the real problem is that the system lost them at the registration form.
Convenience helps — but convenience is not magic
This is where election debates can become too ideological.
One side may argue that expanding voting options dramatically increases participation.
Another may argue that convenience does little because motivated voters will participate anyway.
Research suggests both claims can be overstated.
Universal vote-by-mail systems, for example, have generally produced modest increases in overall turnout, not enormous transformations. Other studies of absentee voting and Election Day registration have found positive turnout effects, while research on early in-person voting has produced mixed results.
The broader lesson is probably more useful than arguing over one voting method.
Reducing the cost of participation can help.
But adding another way to cast a ballot does not automatically create the desire to use it.
Access matters.
So does motivation.
Give people something to decide
This may be particularly important in Tennessee.
ThinkTennessee’s analysis of state elections found that having contested races was a statistically significant predictor of higher turnout. During midterm elections, contested races were associated with turnout about 8.2 percentage points higher.
That is observational evidence, not a randomized experiment.
We should not turn an association into proof that adding a challenger automatically produces eight more points of turnout.
But the mechanism makes sense.
A second candidate does more than add another name to the ballot.
Competition creates campaigns.
Campaigns knock on doors.
Candidates advertise.
News organizations have a race to cover.
Neighbors discuss the choice.
Donors invest.
Volunteers organize.
The voter suddenly has a decision instead of a confirmation.
An election becomes easier to ignore when there is nothing to decide.
That is why candidate recruitment belongs in the turnout conversation.
You cannot solve every participation problem by reminding people to vote.
Sometimes democracy needs somebody willing to run.
Personally asking still matters
One of the most durable findings in voter-turnout research is surprisingly old-fashioned.
Human contact works.
In a randomized experiment involving roughly 30,000 registered voters, Yale researchers Alan Gerber and Donald Green compared nonpartisan door-to-door canvassing, direct mail and telephone calls.
Personal canvassing substantially increased turnout.
Direct mail produced a smaller increase.
Telephone calls in that particular experiment produced no measurable increase.
Research since then has repeatedly found variations on the same theme.
People respond differently when participation becomes personal.
One especially famous experiment demonstrated just how powerful the social component can become.
Researchers mailed different messages to hundreds of thousands of Michigan voters. The strongest treatment told recipients that whether they voted was public record and showed the voting histories of people in their household and neighborhood.
Turnout increased by 8.1 percentage points.
That does not mean governments or civic organizations should start publicly shaming nonvoters.
They should not.
The more important lesson is behavioral:
Voting is not purely an individual act. It is also a social one.
People participate partly because people around them participate.
Someone asks.
Someone reminds them.
Someone expects them.
Someone they know is running.
A family always votes.
A church, civic organization, classroom or neighborhood keeps the election visible.
Community connection can turn participation from an occasional decision into a habit.
Make the consequences concrete
Another experiment gets even closer to what civic journalism can do.
Researchers studying municipal elections in Connecticut asked whether turnout could increase if voters better understood what was actually at stake in local government.
Instead of sending only a generic “remember to vote” message, some voters received information about matters such as their town government’s budget or comparative tax burden.
Messages emphasizing concrete local stakes increased turnout by roughly 2.7 to 4.2 percentage points compared with receiving no mailing, although some comparisons between messages carried statistical uncertainty.
That is a small but important finding.
Telling someone:
Local elections are important
is abstract.
Telling someone:
This office controls this much money, sets this tax or decides this service
gives the election weight.
There is a lesson there for candidates.
For election officials.
For teachers.
And especially for journalists.
People cannot see the consequence of a vote if nobody explains what the office actually controls.
Recognizable people can change the equation too
Our earlier reporting in this series found another recurring pattern.
Political participation does not occur in social isolation.
Research on state and local elections has found that people who are socially closer to political candidates and political networks tend to participate at higher rates. Other recent research examining candidates within family, workplace and community networks has found that having someone from a person’s network running for office can generate a turnout increase of roughly 2 to 4 percentage points within that network.
That does not prove rural Tennesseans vote simply because they know the sheriff candidate.
It does help explain why recognizable candidates and relationship-based politics deserve a place in the turnout discussion.
National politics often reaches voters through television and screens.
Local politics can arrive through a handshake.
The distance matters.
Trust is more complicated than we think
Then we come to trust.
It seems intuitive that people participate when they trust government.
Sometimes they do.
But distrust can also mobilize voters.
People frequently vote precisely because they are angry, dissatisfied or determined to remove someone from office.
So “trust government” may be the wrong turnout goal.
A better concept is efficacy:
Does the citizen understand how the system works?
And do they believe their action has some chance of producing a consequence?
A voter does not need to trust the mayor.
They need to believe there is a meaningful way to replace the mayor.
They do not need to admire the Legislature.
They need to understand when the legislative election happens and whether there is an actual choice.
Democracy does not require public confidence in every officeholder.
It requires enough confidence in the process to believe accountability is possible.
Some things work much less than we expect
This is another reason turnout policy deserves more humility.
Generic information often produces only small effects.
Adding convenience can help without transforming participation.
Traditional civics coursework, by itself, has not consistently produced large causal increases in adult turnout.
Standard mail reminders generally move turnout only modestly.
Even messages designed to reassure voters about election integrity have sometimes failed to increase participation beyond ordinary election reminders.
There is no magic wording.
No perfect postcard.
No single election reform that suddenly makes everyone participate.
That is frustrating if we are looking for a simple program.
It is useful if we are trying to understand the system.
Turnout is built from several conditions
Look across the evidence and a pattern begins to emerge.
People are more likely to vote when the system does several things at once.
Participation is understandable.
Registration and voting are manageable.
There is a meaningful choice.
The consequences are visible.
Candidates and civic institutions actually ask people to participate.
Voting is reinforced by families, communities and social networks.
And voters believe that somebody winning instead of somebody else can produce a real difference.
None of those guarantees participation.
Together, they begin to explain it.
That means low turnout cannot always be assigned to one culprit.
Sometimes voters are disengaged.
Sometimes registration creates friction.
Sometimes campaigns fail to mobilize.
Sometimes nobody runs.
Sometimes local journalism disappears.
Sometimes the consequential election occurs in August while nearly everyone is paying attention to November.
Sometimes the system gives people a ballot and does very little to explain why the choices on it matter.
Tennessee should stop looking for one turnout solution
The state’s participation problem is unlikely to be solved by one new law or one voter campaign.
Different civic ecosystems require different interventions.
Where registration is the barrier, reduce the registration barrier.
Where voters do not know when the important election occurs, explain the calendar.
Where races are uncontested, recruit candidates.
Where voters do not understand an office, explain its powers.
Where community institutions are weak, rebuild civic connections.
Where voting is difficult, remove unnecessary friction.
Where people believe nothing changes, show them what the office controls and how close elections have actually been.
And then ask them.
Personally.
Not because voting is a ritual that proves someone is a good citizen.
Because there is an actual decision in front of them.
That may be the clearest lesson from the research.
People do not need to love politics.
They need a route, a reason and a reminder that they are not participating alone.
Make voting possible.
Make the choice meaningful.
Make the consequence visible.
Then give people a reason to show up.
That is how turnout gets built.
I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I am a commentary writer for Tennessee Lookout and a weekly columnist with Knox TN Today. My work examines public policy, public safety systems and civic responsibility. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.
