Capturing Voter Turnout at the School District Level: Validating a Geospatial Strategy

February 2026

School boards are critical sites of education policymaking, yet scholarship on these institutions is scarce because of severe data limitations. We introduce a geospatial strategy and open-source R package, called “Query, Overlay, Recover” (QOR), that generates high-quality estimates of voter turnout in school board elections overall and for voter subgroups. We describe this process and gather validity evidence using voter files from North Carolina and Washington (2013-2022). We illustrate the value of these data by addressing two substantive research questions that would otherwise not be answerable. We show voter turnout and the representativeness of voters of color are significantly lower in districts serving less advantaged students. The QOR process can now be used to generate district-level elections data nationwide.

Keywords

Politics of Education, School Board Elections, Voter Turnout, Political Representation, Geospatial Methods

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

Methods