Why do education vouchers fail at the ballot box?

- A uniform voucher regime is compared to a regime with public and private education.
- There is no majority support for vouchers over the status quo.
- This result holds even if vouchers do not offer a topping-up option.
- The private school option in the status quo is crucial for these results.

We compare a uniform voucher regime against the status quo mix of public and private education, focusing on the distribution of welfare gains and losses across households by income. We argue that the topping-up option available under uniform vouchers is not sufficiently valuable for the poorer households, so the voucher regime is defeated at the polls. Our result is robust to partial voter turnout and efficiency differences between public and private schools, but depends critically on the opting-out feature in the current system.