Elections define representative democracies but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to polling places. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic, which biannually renews mandates in one-third of Senate constituencies that rotate according to the 1995 election law. We show that in the second and third weeks after the 2020 elections (held on October 9-10), new COVID-19 infections grew significantly faster in voting compared to non-voting constituencies. A temporarily related peak in hospital admissions and essentially no changes in test positivity rates suggest that the acceleration was not merely due to increased testing. The acceleration did not occur in the population above 65, consistently with strategic risk-avoidance by older voters. Our results have implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person (electoral) events during viral outbreaks.

Carlos 3 University of Madrid Department of Economics c Madrid 126 28903 Getafe Madrid Spain

Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education Economics Institute A joint workplace of Charles University Prague and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences Politických vězňů 7 111 21 Prague Czech Republic

Centre for Modelling of Biological and Social Processes Na Břehu 497 15 190 00 Prague Czech Republic

University of Zurich Department of Economics Schönberggasse 1 8001 Zurich Switzerland

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Developing molecular surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in the Czech Republic (2021-2022)