How easy is it to vote in your state? Here's how it ranks

New York Times chart; for a larger version, click on it. To download it, right-click.

How much time and trouble does it take to vote in your state? In other words, how much does it cost? The answer is available, at least in relative terms, from the Cost of Voting in American States: 2022, a nonpartisan academic study. The previous report was in 2020, before an "avalanche of voting laws passed by state legislatures across the country after the 2020 election," The New York Times reports.

"Voters in New Hampshire and Mississippi face the highest personal cost in the country in terms of the time and effort required to cast a ballot. Voters in Oregon and Washington have it the easiest," the Times reports. "Researchers focused on 10 categories related to voting, including registration, inconvenience, early voting, polling hours and absentee voting. The two categories given the most weight, according to Scot Schraufnagel, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and an author of the study, were ease of registration to vote and the availability of early voting, both in person and by mail. . . . The study draws a distinction between early voting and in-person absentee voting, which, according to Dr. Schraufnagel, 'looks a lot like early voting but is not the same thing,' because it can be limited to county election offices rather than more numerous polling sites."

UPDATE, Sept. 23: The report has a similar graph showing voter-registration deadlines; here's a map from The Washington Post with essentially the same information: