  A potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast
an in-person ballot, including the costs associated with identifying and
traveling to a polling place. In order to investigate how these costs affect
voting behavior, we introduce two quasi-experimental designs that can be used
to study how the political participation of registered voters is affected by
differences in the relative distance that registrants must travel to their
assigned Election Day polling place and whether their polling place remains at
the same location as in a previous election. Our designs make comparisons of
registrants who live on the same residential block, but are assigned to vote at
different polling places. We find that living farther from a polling place and
being assigned to a new polling place reduce in-person Election Day voting, but
that registrants largely offset for this by casting more early in-person and
mail ballots.
