Disenfranchisement kills babies?

It’s not a *huge* stretch.

This paper studies the introduction of electronic voting technology in Brazilian elections.

Estimates exploiting a regression discontinuity design indicate that electronic voting reduced residual (error-ridden and uncounted) votes and promoted a large de facto enfranchisement of mainly less educated citizens.

Estimates exploiting the unique pattern of the technology’s phase-in across states over time suggest that, as predicted by political economy models, it shifted government spending towards health care, which is particularly beneficial to the poor.

Positive effects on both the utilization of health services (prenatal visits) and newborn health (low-weight births) are also found for less educated mothers, but not for the more educated.

From Thomas Fujiwara, who cannot seem to write a bad paper. (Now with a link!)

We cannot reasonably generalize his result to insidious voter ID laws in the US, but oh, I will.

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