Nevada Secretary of State 2022
The takeaways
Handwritten letters likely helped the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Nevada - and the candidate for Senate
The backstory
Many of us have received, or sent, election mail with this common phrase: “Who you vote for is private, but whether you vote is public information.” At Vote Forward, we have used that publicly available turnout data to measure our letter program’s impact for over six years, starting with our very first trial in 2017. But because vote choice data is private, assessing whether these handwritten letters can also change how people vote is more challenging. In 2022 in Nevada, we designed a special experiment to measure letters’ impact on electoral outcomes for the first time.
In partnership with our collaborators at Stand Up America, we decided to focus on Nevada’s secretary of state race because it was one of the elections where supporting a Democrat would directly support democracy. (Vote Forward runs explicitly partisan “Political” letter campaigns like this, as well as our nonpartisan “Social” campaigns.) Secretaries of state have significant power over how elections are run. They can use this power to protect and expand voting rights, as the Democratic candidate in Nevada, Cisco Aguilar, promised to do. Or they can work to undermine free and fair elections: Aguilar’s Republican opponent Jim Marchant was a 2020 election denier who had pledged to restrict early voting. Yet many voters are unaware of the importance of this state-level office. We designed our letters to inform Nevada voters about the critical role of the secretary of state, while also providing factual information about both candidates.
Our hope was that these letters would both boost voter turnout and candidate performance. To measure both of these outcomes, we had to design a special study called a precinct-randomized trial, where our unit of measurement was voting precincts rather than individual voters. Since candidate vote shares are reported at the precinct level, we could use this precinct-randomized trial to directly measure our letters’ impact on Cisco Aguilar’s performance. However, there is a tradeoff: since there are many fewer precincts than voters, our ability to detect impact (statistical power) is reduced. Our study included nearly 200,000 voters, but only 316 precincts.
With this special design, we saw evidence that our handwritten letters boosted the precinct vote share and margin for the Democratic SOS candidate by +0.3-0.4 percentage points. This result did not reach statistical significance, which was not surprising, given the design tradeoff described above. What was surprising is that we also measured a positive impact on the performance of the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Catherine Cortez-Masto, even though our letters did not mention the Senate at all. This suggests that our Nevada letters worked by mobilizing Democratic votes up and down the ballot, rather than by convincing voters to switch their votes, and indeed our turnout findings support this: we measured a voter-level turnout impact of +0.5 percentage points.
This result means we still don’t know for sure if Vote Forward letters can change voters’ choices. However, it does suggest that boosting a candidate at one level of the ballot can lift up other candidates, and this may ultimately have been even more consequential for Nevada’s 2022 election outcomes. While Aguilar won the secretary of state race by a comfortable 2.2-point margin, Cortez-Masto won her Senate seat by less than a point. Her opponent, Adam Laxalt, was also a 2020 election denier - making both of these Nevada elections a victory not just for particular candidates, but for truth and transparency.
In our Political letters for 2024, we’re building on this exciting finding by including more information about candidates for U.S. House and Senate, so that voters can make informed choices. You can visit our Campaigns page to adopt these letters, or letters from one of our many other campaign offerings.
