Ohio Ballot Initiative 2023
The takeaways
Letters focused on a reproductive freedom initiative produced a small turnout boost among women voters in Ohio’s November 2023 election
The backstory
Following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, abortion access was suddenly put back into the hands of state governments. In a handful of states - including Ohio - the question was put directly to voters. 2023’s Issue 1 proposed to provide a state constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions”. Abortion had become fully illegal in 13 states following Dobbs, including three of the five states that border Ohio. If Issue 1 failed, Ohio was at risk of joining them.
In this context, we decided to test whether handwritten letters to Ohio voters could raise turnout in the November 2023 elections, while also informing them about the implications of a “Yes” or “No” vote on Issue 1. We chose to focus specifically on younger women voters, who are the most directly impacted by the consequences of laws that expand or restrict access to abortion and other types of reproductive healthcare. (A note on gender inclusivity: most voter data includes only binary “Male” or “Female” gender labels. For the purposes of this study, we included voters labeled “Female.”)
Ballot initiatives can be notoriously confusing for voters to understand - in fact, they are often written this way on purpose. Compounding this problem, many Ohio voters had just voted on a different Issue 1 several months earlier. To help our letter recipients make an informed choice, we included part of the text of the initiative verbatim, and clarified that a “No” vote would allow an abortion ban to take effect.
As in our previous studies, this campaign was structured as a randomized trial, with half of our voters assigned to receive letters and half in the control group (check out our Research FAQs for more information about randomized trials). Our experimental results estimated that these letters increased turnout by about 0.2 percentage points. This isn’t quite large enough to be statistically significant, which means that we have only moderate confidence in this number. One likely explanation is that baseline turnout was unexpectedly super-high, which can mask our ability to measure an effect. (We observed a similar combination of small effect and super-high turnout with our Political letters in Wisconsin the same year.) Though our data models estimated that these young women voters in Ohio would only vote at a baseline rate of around 20%, in reality, they turned out at a rate of nearly 61%!
Clearly, the issue of reproductive freedom was extremely important to voters in Ohio, just as it was elsewhere. And, like other states that put the question of reproductive freedom directly in voters’ hands, Ohioans voted to protect access by a 14-point margin. Ultimately, even if high turnout makes it more challenging to measure impact, we’re happy to live in a world where so many voters care enough to show up in an “off-year” election.
We’ll also note that this experiment was not designed to measure voters’ choices about Issue 1, since assessing our impact on vote choice requires a more complex study design, such as the one we ran in Nevada’s 2022 secretary of state race. It’s very possible that, while our Ohio letters only boosted turnout by a moderate amount, they did influence how voters thought about Issue 1, by providing them valuable and clear information about what was at stake. We hope to test this more directly in a future experimental campaign.
You can write letters to voters in Ohio and other critical states for this year’s general election now! Visit our Campaigns page to choose a letter campaign and adopt voters.
