Corporal and Cognizant Barriers to Voting: the Impact of COVID-19 on the 2020 Election Season in St. Louis

In 2020, two key elections in St. Louis, Missouri, took place in the midst of the intertwined pandemics of COVID-19 and racialized violence. Local community leaders in St. Louis emphasized a need to mobilize voters, particularly in communities of color, to engage in the elections in August and November 2020 as a tool for advancing health and racial equity. COVID-19 created a new set of barriers to voting. This study documents two typologies of challenges that organizers faced in their efforts to mobilize voters and increase participation in the election. The first is corporal — the use of one’s physical body and the risk within. The second is cognizant — the regulatory proficiency needed to navigate the shifting rules of the voting process. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of twenty-eight mobilizers working within low-income, poverty-impacted neighborhoods in St. Louis City and St. Louis County, which disproportionately consist of residents of color. Findings suggest COVID-19 created additional unforeseen barriers to voting. Corporal: Local ordinances that mandated limited in person gatherings and social distancing were serious obstacles to traditional voter mobilization efforts and created trepidation about in-person voting for fear of being exposed to the virus. Cognizant: The state of Missouri in an effort to address some of the public health concerns created additional rules for absentee or mail-in voting for limited populations with a complicated set of rules that confused mobilizers and voters.