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The methods used to select public officials affect the preferences they bring to office, the incentives they face while in office, and, ultimately, the policy goals they pursue. We argue that the preferences and actions of local election officials (LEOs) differ depending on whether they are elected or appointed. We test these expectations with a data set that includes the survey responses of 1,200 Wisconsin LEOs, structured interviews, census data, and returns from the 2008 presidential election. Drawing upon a natural experiment in how officials are selected, we find that, compared to appointed officials, elected officials express greater support for voter access and express less concern about ballot security and administrative costs. For appointed officials, we find that voter turnout in a municipality is lower when the LEO’s self-reported partisanship differs from the partisanship of the electorate but only in cases where the official is a Republican. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Voter registration is widely viewed as a barrier to voter participation in general, and especially so for likely Democratic voters. A popular remedy for both turnout effects is election day registration (EDR), which eliminates the closing date by permitting registration at the polls. Following earlier research we posit a small positive effect of EDR on turnout. But contrary to conventional wisdom, we theorize that individuals most likely to take advantage of EDR are in fact Republican voters. To investigate these causal effects we make use of a natural experiment in Wisconsin. When EDR was implemented in Wisconsin in 1976, only municipalities that already required registration were affected by the change in the law. Analysis of this intervention shows that EDR did increase turnout in Wisconsin but actually decreased the Democratic share of the two-party vote for president. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]