Finding Insights in Florida Voter Participation

Abstract

In this research, we analyzed voter registration and elections data released by the Florida Division of Elections to investigate the profile of Florida voter participation. The utilized data was associated with federal general elections from 2014 to 2020. Data preparation issues were resolved during the data merging, including exact duplicates, multiple associated vote types, and misclassified vote types. The merged data consisted of voter ID, registration county code, zip code, sex, ethnicity, age, vote type for each general election year, voting indicator for each general election year, and county code. Boosted Tree model (with a misclassification rate of 0.22) identified zip code, age, and voter status are key factors that influence voter participation. Based on voter eligibility and total vote counts in each general election held between 2014 and 2020, voters were classified into the following profile categories: always-voted (participated in all elections), increasing-in-voting (participated in recent elections but not in the past elections), intermittent-in-voting (participated in some elections but not all), decreasing-in-voting (participated past elections but not recently), never-voted (didn’t participate in the elections), and not-eligible (registered but under 18 years of age). Voter profile counts information was merged with Census demographic information at the zip code level. To find insights into the voter profiles, we created Tableau dashboards to view voter profiles, voting methods, and the effect of census variables on voter turnout at the zip code level. We hope this dashboard helps organizations like the League of Women Voters of Florida target their voter participation and engagement activities at the zip code level.