Voter Registration Costs and Disenfranchisement: Experimental Evidence from France

In each precinct, we identi ed addresses and apartments in which unregistered and misregistered citizens were likely to reside as follows. We rst collected the list of citizens registered at the precinct as of January 2011 and ordered it by address. Between May and September 2011, surveyors went to each address and wrote down names found on the mailboxes or on intercoms and the corresponding apartment numbers. This preliminary work was conducted at 6,030 addresses, excluding addresses that were not found or were inaccessible to the canvassers. When all names found on a mailbox also appeared on the voter roll, we excluded the corresponding apartment from the experiment, given the low probability of nding unregistered or misregistered citizens there. In 17 percent of addresses, it was impossible to link apartments to mailboxes, due to the lack of any number or available identi cation, so that all apartments were covered by canvassers, whether included in the sample or not. Overall, 20,502 apartments likely to host unregistered or misregistered citizens, located at 4,118 addresses, were included in the experimental sample.