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by Annie Waldman and Aliyya Swaby

Sign up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy, a series of personalized emails that help you understand the upcoming election, from who’s on your ballot to how to cast your vote.

This story was co-published with Gray TV/Investigate TV.

One in five Americans struggles to read English at a basic level, and without the necessary reading and writing skills, everyday tasks can be insurmountable. The routine challenges of low literacy take a toll on individual livelihoods as well as this country’s collective democracy. For people who struggle to read, the electoral process can become its own form of literacy test — creating impenetrable barriers at every step, from registration to casting a ballot.

Our reporting has found that helping people with low literacy skills to read their ballots at the polls enables them to understand what and who they are voting for and ensures that their votes are counted. But decades of voter suppression — particularly in the South — have made this kind of assistance difficult to access in many communities.

We wanted to better understand the relationship between literacy and voter turnout. For decades, academic and political researchers have studied the factors that influence voter participation, including the impact of educational attainment on whether people vote. But literacy skills are less commonly featured in elections research. There are few reliable databases documenting literacy rates in the United States. But in recent years, the National Center for Education Statistics has released more granular information on literacy levels, including estimates of reading skills at the county level. Using this data, we can ask more pointed questions about how literacy skills correlate with voter participation.

Data Sources

To understand voter participation rates across the country, we acquired county-level turnout data for the 2018 midterm election and the 2016 and 2020 general elections from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Elections. The election data comprises vote counts for more than 3,100 counties across the country. We compared the raw county vote totals with the citizen voting-age population in each county, drawn from U.S. Census Bureau estimates, for each election year. The citizen voting-age population includes all people 18 and older who are native or naturalized citizens, and the number is frequently used as a base figure in turnout calculations.

Some researchers prefer to use a different number as their denominator — the voting-eligible population, which is adjusted to remove those disenfranchised due to felony convictions, and sometimes also those ruled ineligible due to a mental disability. We chose to use a broader denominator so we could include all people who potentially could cast ballots if felony voting restrictions were lifted. Another requirement for voting in the United States is registration: All states, except for North Dakota, require eligible voters to officially register before they vote. We chose not to limit our analysis to registered voters, as the registration process can function as a major barrier for people with low literacy levels. We did not include U.S. territories, Puerto Rico or Alaska in our analysis, due to incomplete or unavailable data.

To understand variations in literacy levels across the country, we used modeled survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which was collected as part of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), also known as the Survey of Adult Skills. The data includes state and county estimates of average literacy levels and is based on the results of surveys collected in 2012, 2014 and 2017. The survey assesses adults for a range of skills, including reading ability and comprehension, numeracy and digital problem-solving. It represents the most comprehensive picture of the nation’s literacy levels today. The county and state literacy estimates are produced using a statistical method called small area estimation, which, in addition to the survey results, incorporates additional covariate data, such as educational attainment and poverty figures, to allow for a better extrapolation of survey data to low-population areas.

There are limitations to using modeled, survey-based estimates to understand larger national trends. More reliable data could be derived from a survey that examined both literacy and voter participation or from a more comprehensive survey that doesn’t require external data points to bolster responses. At this time, those surveys do not exist, so the PIAAC data remains the best option for understanding variations in nationwide literacy rates. This data has regularly been used by both federal researchers and academics.

For our analysis, we compared counties with low estimated literacy rates to those where literacy was estimated to be proficient or better. We defined proficiency or nearing proficiency as people who, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, have, at a minimum, the skills to complete reading and writing tasks, such as comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing and drawing low-level inferences. People with low literacy skills may be able to read a basic vocabulary and decipher short texts, but their reading comprehension abilities are severely limited. The National Center for Education Statistics defined adults with low literacy skills as those who tested at or below the lowest proficiency level of the national survey, or those who were unable to participate in the survey because of cognitive, physical or language barriers.

About 80% of American adults were assessed as proficient or nearing proficiency in reading, and 20% had difficulty completing literacy tasks, according to the national survey. While adults born outside the country are disproportionately represented among the lowest-skilled levels, two-thirds of adults with low reading skills were born in the United States. White and Hispanic adults constitute 70% of adults with low literacy, and Black adults were overrepresented, making up 23% of adults with low literacy while accounting for less than 13% of the total population.

Top-line Findings

If more people who live in counties with low literacy voted, especially in tight races, it could potentially sway the outcome of elections. Our analysis found that as the literacy rates in a county decline, voter participation also tends to decrease.

We plotted county-level voter turnout against the percentage of residents in each county with low estimated literacy levels, and again against the share with high estimated literacy levels, and we found inverse relationships between the two literacy groups. For the purposes of our calculations, the low literacy level was defined as the population that is at or below Level 1 in indirect literacy estimates, and high estimated literacy levels were defined as Level 3 or above. As the percentage of people with low literacy in each county increases, voter turnout tends to decrease (2016: r = -0.57, p < 0.0001; 2018: r = -0.57, p < 0.0001; 2020: r = -0.58, p < 0.0001). Conversely, as the percentage of people with higher literacy skills goes up, voter turnout increases (2016: r = 0.60, p < 0.0001; 2018: r = 0.60, p < 0.0001; 2020: r = 0.61, p < 0.0001 ). This trend appeared consistently for all three election years we analyzed: 2016, 2018 and 2020. The relationship between voter turnout and literacy levels does not appear to be a random pattern.

Counties With Lower Literacy Levels Often See Lower Voter Turnout Source: Literacy estimate data from the National Center for Education Statistics; election data from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Elections (2016 presidential election data) and the U.S. Census Bureau (Citizen Voting-Age Population Estimate, 2016). Note: The low literacy level used in county literacy calculations is defined as the population that is at or below Level 1 in indirect literacy estimates, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Voter turnout is defined as the total number of votes in each election divided by the citizen voting-age population. (Graphic by Annie Waldman)

However, as the saying goes, correlation is not causation. While our analysis shows a valid pattern, our findings do not suggest that lower literacy rates cause lower turnout, or that higher literacy rates increase voter participation. We also do not know whether the adults who are not voting are the same adults as those with low literacy skills.

That said, there’s a robust body of research connecting educational attainment to voter turnout: “A person’s level of formal educational attainment is a very strong predictor of whether they vote in elections, especially nonpresidential elections,” said Barry Burden, a professor and the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Recent data from the federal Current Population Survey supports this long-standing trend. Data on educational attainment and voter turnout from the 2020 Voting and Registration Supplement shows that among Americans with less than a high school diploma or its equivalent, the percentage who reported that they voted is similar to the share who said they didn’t vote. But with each additional level of educational attainment, the percentage of people reporting that they voted increases. For Americans with only a high school diploma who have not attended college, the percentage who said they voted was twice as big as the share saying they did not vote. For adults with only a bachelor’s degree, the group who said they’d voted was about nine times the size of the group that reported that they did not vote. And for adults with a master’s degree, about 17 times as many people reported voting as not voting. Given the deep link between education and turnout, the notion that literacy might have a similar connection is not unreasonable.

Some of the most consequential elections of our time have been determined by narrow margins — just tens of thousands of votes in a country of hundreds of millions of people. For example, in 2016, Donald Trump secured the presidency by winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan with a total margin of just under 80,000 votes. In 2018, Ron DeSantis won Florida’s gubernatorial election by about 32,000 votes. And in 2020, President Joe Biden prevailed by winning Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by about 40,000 votes combined.

Given how relatively few people can swing an election, we wanted to consider what the impact might be of people with low literacy skills staying away from the polls. We clustered counties across the country by average literacy level, producing three equal groups of about 1,030 counties each, and calculated average turnout for low-, medium- and high-literacy counties. For example, in 2020, across the United States, counties with low literacy levels had an average voter turnout of 58.8%, and those with high literacy levels had turnout of 73.1% on average. We then applied the participation rate of high-literacy counties (73.1%) to the total population of low-literacy counties to estimate how many votes those counties might be “missing.” We found that if counties with lower literacy levels had similar participation rates to high-literacy areas, turnout could increase by up to 7 million votes nationally. Of course, we cannot predict or assume for whom any additional votes would be cast.

Caveats

The purpose of this analysis was to gain a better sense of the relationship between turnout and literacy, rather than conduct a causal or inferential analysis. There are several limitations that could affect our understanding.

For our analysis, we relied on county-level data, and as it represents groups (i.e. counties) rather than individuals, we cannot be certain that the low-literacy people in each county were the same individuals who were not voting. Thus, one reason for the correlation between literacy and turnout could be that literacy is acting as a proxy for other factors that influence participation, like lower levels of income or a lack of social capital.

While literacy may impact voter participation, there are many other reasons why some parts of the country may cast fewer ballots. People do not vote for a number of reasons, including difficulty getting time off from work and limited options for transportation to the polls. Some people may not have much interaction with voter mobilization groups and others may feel disengaged from politics. And barriers in the process, like states disenfranchising people with felony convictions, may also impede voter participation. Some of these factors may also be influenced by an individual’s ability to read.

An important limitation of the Current Population Survey is that it relies on self-reporting, and individuals’ responses about whether they voted have not been verified against official voting records. Thus, the data is susceptible to misreporting. Some research has shown that higher socioeconomic or educational attainment levels may be associated with higher misreporting, which could affect the results.

Election participation is often influenced by local policies, and the correlation between literacy and voter turnout varies by state. While the majority of states exhibit moderate to strong relationships between voter participation and literacy, in a handful of states, there are weaker connections, which presents an intriguing path for a more comprehensive future analysis. There may be state-by-state differences in voting accessibility or ballot complexity that may also have varying effects on turnout.

In addition, the literacy data has limitations. As mentioned above, the National Center for Education Statistics developed a predictive model based on the results from its skills survey and a handful of auxiliary data points from the census, used to bolster the model’s predictive precision. These data points include, but are not limited to, high school diploma rates, poverty levels, racial breakdowns, health insurance coverage and fraction of the population working service jobs. These variables might confound the literacy variable’s relationship with turnout, possibly boosting the correlation.

The literacy data for counties with fewer residents may also have greater uncertainty than the data for more populous counties. These small counties may affect the results of the analysis, particularly in analyses done at the state level in states that have numerous small counties. These small counties, with fewer than 1,500 people, represent about 2% of all 3,100 counties in the data set. To assess their influence, we resampled the data, randomly drawing new estimates for each county, and reran the analysis 1,000 times. The findings did not significantly change.

One in Five Americans Struggles to Read. We Want to Understand Why.

by Aliyya Swaby and Annie Waldman

Sign up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy, a series of personalized emails that help you understand the upcoming election, from who’s on your ballot to how to cast your vote.

This story was co-published with Gray TV/Investigate TV.

Faye Combs used to enter the voting booth with trepidation. Unable to read until she was in her 40s, she would struggle to decipher the words on the ballot, intimidated by how quickly the people around her finished and departed. “When the election was over, I didn’t even realize what I had voted for because it was just so much reading,” she said.

Combs’ feelings of insecurity and disorientation when faced with a ballot are not unusual. Voters with low literacy skills are more likely to take what they read literally and act on each word, sometimes without considering context, literacy experts say. Distractions can more easily derail them, causing them to stop reading too soon.

“I’ve seen people try to read [the ballot] left to right and end up skipping entire contests,” said Kathryn Summers, a University of Baltimore professor who has spent decades studying how information can be made more accessible. She has found that voters who struggle to read are also more likely to make mistakes on their registration applications, such as writing their birth date incorrectly or forgetting to fill in the check box that indicates they are a citizen, either of which could lead to their vote being rejected.

As a ProPublica investigation found, today’s election system remains a modern-day literacy test — a convoluted obstacle course for people who struggle to read. Though many people may require assistance with registration or at the ballot box, some counties and states have made it more challenging to secure help.

Experts say that redesigning both the registration and election processes to be more accessible will allow more people to vote without assistance and participate more robustly in democracy. Ballots and forms should be simply written and logically laid out, jargon should be stripped from instructions and ballot amendments and, if possible, new forms should be tested on a diverse group of constituents.

Such reforms can be expensive and time-consuming, which stops some states and municipalities from taking on the task, said Dana Chisnell, who co-founded the nonprofit Center for Civic Design to help states and counties develop accessible voter materials. “They may have old voting systems that they’re holding together with duct tape and baling twine because they can’t afford to replace them or there were other priorities in the county,” she said.

But numerous examples show that when such changes are made, more votes get counted. “If we make it better for people with low literacy, it will actually be better for everyone,” Summers said.

Improving Ballot Design

As ProPublica has written, bad ballot design can sabotage up to hundreds of thousands of votes each election year. After the confusing butterfly ballot infamously wreaked havoc in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, the federal government increased its oversight and regulation of local election administration, including by issuing voluntary guidelines for how ballots and election materials should look. But states and counties continue to wind up with miscast or uncast votes as a result of design failures.

In 2018, for example, Florida’s Broward County used a ballot where the names of Senate candidates were listed at the bottom of a column, under a long list of instructions.

In most of the state, where other ballot designs were used, the Senate race drew about the same number of votes as the governor’s race. But in Broward County, a Democratic stronghold, fewer people voted for Senate than for governor, which was the race listed at the top of the second column. It’s likely that many people simply missed the Senate race at the bottom of the page. This discrepancy amounted to around 25,000 votes that were never cast. Republican Rick Scott won the race by about 10,000 votes.

Improving design has resulted in fewer skipped races and rejected ballots. The Center for Civic Design has created free online guides for designing accessible forms, which are intended to help local election officials short on resources.

If the essence of democracy is making sure that everyone who is eligible can vote, the election process should lean toward inclusion and accessibility, said Whitney Quesenbery, co-founder and executive director of the center. “Someone who has decided to vote ought to have a fair shot at getting their ballot counted,” she said. “The way you make sure that it gets honored is by telling people what they have to do in a clear way.”

Accessibility experts like Quesenbery say that these changes can improve the voting process for everyone, but especially for voters with limited reading abilities.

In 2010, New York voters got confusing messages if they accidentally overvoted — that is, voted for too many candidates — using machines made by two companies, Election Systems and Software and Dominion. The electronic screen on ES&S machines featured a red button saying “Don’t Cast — Return Ballot” and a green button saying “Accept.” Similarly, the Dominion machines featured a red button labeled “Return” and a green button labeled “Cast.” It was unclear which button would actually allow voters to fix the problem and many pressed the green button, which submitted their incorrectly filled-out ballot and meant that their vote was not counted at all.

As a result of a lawsuit that the Brennan Center for Justice and other groups filed against New York election officials, ES&S changed the messages on its buttons before the 2012 election, but Dominion did not get final permission for similar changes in time. The new buttons on ES&S machines gave voters the option to either “correct your ballot” or “cast your ballot with mistakes” — a much easier choice to understand than the previous options. That election year, rates of overvoting declined on both machines, but ES&S machines saw twice as big a drop as Dominion machines.

ES&S spokesperson Katina Granger said the accessibility changes for that election show “the need to continually obtain real world feedback from both customers and usability experts.” Dominion did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

ES&S changed its message to be less confusing for voters who accidentally selected too many candidates. (Brennan Center for Justice)

In advance of the 2014 election, Florida’s Escambia County redesigned its absentee ballot forms to format instructions as a checklist on the outside of the envelope, add simple illustrations and place a colored highlight over the spot where voters were supposed to sign. Many states, including Florida, require absentee ballots to be rejected if a signature is missing or doesn’t match other records. The new design’s emphasis on providing a signature reduced the share of ballots that were missing a signature by 42% between 2014 and 2016, and reduced by 53% the share of ballots that were rejected even after voters were offered a chance to add their signatures.

The new ballot envelope being used in Florida’s Escambia County prompts voters to include a signature and date. (Center for Civic Design)

Similarly, New York redesigned its statewide absentee ballot template in 2020. The number of rejected absentee ballots in New York City decreased from around 22% in that year’s primary to just 4% by the general election.

New York’s newly redesigned ballot envelope more clearly marks where voters should sign. (Gotham Gazette) Fixing Voter Registration

Many states have redesigned their voter registration forms, making the very first step in the election process more accessible for voters with low literacy skills. In 2015, when Pennsylvania launched online voter registration for the first time, state elections officials worked with the Center for Civic Design to test early versions with residents of the state. Their input helped officials design final versions of both online and paper forms with simplified language and minimal text on the page. The sections on the paper application are more clearly defined, with the instructions on the left and the voter tasks on the right. Pennsylvania noticed a decrease in rejected voter registration forms since the launch of the new forms, according to Department of State spokesperson Grace Griffaton, but could not separate the effect of the simpler design from the launch of online registration.

Pennsylvania’s newly redesigned paper application features simpler language and minimal text on the page, compared to the previous version. (Pennsylvania Department of State)

States like Colorado, Vermont and New York have created similar designs.

This year, Vermont debuted its new online registration form, completed with assistance from the Center for Civic Design, according to Secretary of State Jim Condos. Election workers had struggled to read voters’ handwriting on the previous form, which featured cramped spaces where residents had to fill in their information. The new form is much easier to fill out and read. “It’s really about making sure the language is simple enough but to the point,” Condos said.

Vermont updated its voter registration form to include simpler language and more room for voters to write in. (Vermont Secretary of State) Learning From Other Countries

The United States has some of the lowest voter registration and turnout rates among its international peers. It also stands out for its relatively burdensome voting process. Many experts believe these two things are related.

Other industrialized countries with comparable or even lower literacy rates to the United States tend to have higher levels of voter turnout. One simple reason for their increased participation is that they make it easier to vote. Most of them have some form of compulsory or automatic voter registration in place, according to research from the Pew Research Center and the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network. Countries allow citizens to vote on Election Day without having to actively sign up beforehand, or they automatically register citizens who interact with government organizations, like motor vehicle departments or social service agencies. Other countries, like Australia, have gone further and made voting mandatory, and citizens who do not cast ballots may be subject to penalties.

Turnout Is Lower in the U.S. Than in Other Countries With Similar Literacy Scores The voting rate was calculated as the average turnout as a percentage of the voting-age population in each country’s two most recent presidential or parliamentary elections. Voting data was obtained from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the U.S. Census Bureau and Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Elections. Literacy data obtained from OECD Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. Data was not available for all countries. (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica) Turnout Is Lower in the U.S. Than in Other Countries With Similar Literacy Scores The voting rate was calculated as the average turnout as a percentage of the voting-age population in each country’s two most recent presidential or parliamentary elections. Voting data was obtained from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the U.S. Census Bureau and Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Elections. Literacy data obtained from OECD Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. Data was not available for all countries. (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

In nations with automatic registration programs in place, the percentage of people who are signed up to vote is substantially higher than in the United States, where only 67% of the voting-age population is registered. By comparison, in Canada, 93% of the voting-age population is registered to vote, and similarly, that number is 94% in Sweden and 99% in Slovakia, according to Pew. In the United Kingdom, where government officials seek out voters every year through nationwide canvassing, the registration rate is 92%.

Barry Burden, a professor and the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that in the United States, the registration step “is probably more of a deterrent to voter participation than we realize,” he said. “It’s a little challenging for most voters, but if a person doesn’t have the literacy skills or language skills to navigate that bureaucratic process, it could be a deterrent to even getting registered or getting a ballot in the first place.”

The United States is starting to shift its registration policies. Some states have initiated automatic voter registration programs, which use information from other government agencies to complete registration electronically unless people opt out. Since 2015, at least 15 states and Washington, D.C., have launched automatic registration programs, and the impact has been extraordinary — with new systems in place, registrations increased by 16% in Oregon, 27% in California and 94% in Georgia.

Allowing people to register on the same day they vote could increase participation, too. Voters who made errors earlier in the process would have another opportunity to register or fill out their ballots alongside election officials who could ensure their accuracy. As of 2012, states with same-day registration had, on average, 10% higher turnout than states without, according to the Center for American Progress.

Empowering Voters

Combs, who is now 78, no longer feels intimidated in the voting booth. She understands that there are many people like her, who have figured out ways to navigate the world without being able to read well enough to handle routine civic duties like voting.

At the age of 7, Combs was sexually abused by a stranger, a trauma that shadowed her childhood, she said, making it harder for her to remember the lessons she had learned in school. She pressured classmates for the answers to homework and exams, and her teachers passed her on from grade to grade. When she graduated from high school in Bakersfield, California, she said, she left with the secret that she couldn’t read. She was too ashamed to tell her husband until seven years into their marriage. She often brought him into the polling booth because she didn’t even know where to sign her name on the election forms.

Working as a manager of Berkeley’s Meals on Wheels program, Combs thought she was hiding her inability to read from her coworkers — until one day her secretary left a flyer on her desk about a local literacy program. She began learning with a tutor, strengthening both her ability to read and her desire to be more politically engaged. Since then, Combs has made it her mission to empower people to learn how to read and participate in democracy.

She now works with the Key to Community Project, which guides struggling readers through the voting process, helping them develop skills to research candidates and understand how elections work. The nonpartisan project, led by people who learned to read as adults, is an extension of California Library Literacy Services, the country’s first statewide library-based literacy program. Literacy advocates argue that states should contribute more to adult education in order to increase workforce skills and democratic participation. Combs counsels participants in the California program not to worry about taking as much time as they need to understand the ballot.

“I know what the shame is, but you have to move beyond that shame,” Combs said. “That attitude about ‘My vote doesn’t count’ needs to be banished.”

One in Five Americans Struggles to Read. We Want to Understand Why.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

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