The NBA today announced that no games will be played on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8, declaring that “the scheduling decision came out of the NBA family’s focus on promoting nonpartisan civic engagement and encouraging fans to make a plan to vote during midterm elections.”

Is there . . . any evidence at all that playing NBA games on the evenings of Election Day impedes voter turnout?

The elections are held on Tuesdays, and NBA games usually begin around 7 p.m. local time. The earliest poll-closing times in the country are Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m.; the latest is New York at 9 p.m. local. If the Indiana Pacers were to hold a game that evening, the polls would have closed about an hour before tip-off.

Even if the teams, coaches, referees, stadium employees, and other personnel have to get to work well before then, they would have had the opportunity to get to their polling places and cast their ballots since 6 a.m., and that’s not counting the copious early-voting opportunities. In Indiana, in-person absentee voting starts 28 days before Election Day. Only four states — Alabama, Connecticut, Mississippi, and New Hampshire — do not offer pre–Election Day in-person voting options for all voters, though they may offer pre–Election Day in-person voting options for eligible absentee voters. While all of those states have their share of NBA fans, none of those states are home to NBA teams.

On November 6, 2018, the NBA held four games. That day, Americans voted at the highest turnout rate in a midterm election since 1914.

The four games were in Charlotte, where North Carolina’s turnout was a “robust” 53 percent; Dallas, where Texas’s turnout was 46.3 percent; Phoenix, where Arizona’s turnout hit a near-record for midterms at nearly 65 percent; and Portland, where 63 percent of eligible Oregonians turned in a ballot. (Note that in Oregon, everyone votes by mail. There is no way that a Trail Blazers game can be the reason someone didn’t vote.) All four states saw significant jumps compared to four years earlier. For those who didn’t vote in those states, they didn’t decline to exercise their right because the NBA was playing that night.

If the NBA wants to not schedule games on Election Day, that’s their right. But it appears to be a solution in search of a problem.