Young voters aged 18-24 reflected a similar sentiment to nonvoters at large, with 28 percent of those not registered saying they weren’t due to a lack of interest.

Responses were open-ended with respondents coming up with their own answers for pollsters.

But the lack of focus on legal obstacles to voting shouldn’t serve as encouragement for those seeking to impose further restrictions, advisers to the study maintained. Political scientists have a general consensus that asking nonvoters to explain their actions is not an effective way to measure voter suppression, painting a far more nuanced image of the issue.

“To find out the effects of [restrictive voting laws], you really don’t want to ask voters about it. They really don’t have a feel of how institutions’ rules affect them,” said Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University who advised the study.

Though the laws dictating voter registration play a major role in blocking people from turning out, voters generally see them as the background conditions for their decisions, and they rarely identify them as dictating their political decisions over faith in a candidate or an issue, activists said.

“I suspect when voters make the conscious decision to go to the polls ... they’re not saying, ‘Well, because the polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., I was able to vote this year,’” Ho said. “They think, ‘Oh, I really care about this midterm,’ and, if it works in their schedule, they go.”

Yanna Krupnikov, another adviser to the Knight survey and a political science professor at Stony Brook University, added that nonvoters may feel social pressure to offer more philosophical explanations of why they stayed home, rather than admit that the voting system was too complicated.

“When there are so many social messages that people get to vote, to turn out, about how important that is, it becomes even harder to give a reason for not voting that seems random or spontaneous or not good enough,” Krupnikov said.

But Hersh said that no matter how many other factors actually contribute to nonvoters opting to stay home from the polls, the reasons respondents themselves identified shouldn’t be lightly dismissed.

When asked what could motivate them to vote in more elections, a plurality of nonvoters cited “a candidate I believe in” with 22 percent. Seven percent of nonvoters said they would vote more often “If my vote would affect the outcome.”