Lost in the Mail? Vote by Mail and Voter Confidence

Abstract

The use of vote by mail was an important topic during the 2020 election cycle. This election coincided with the most significant public health crisis in the United States in a century, combined with a scandal at the U.S. Postal Service to slow down mail ballots to potentially benefit President Trump and a coordinated messaging campaign to question the results of the election, all of which may have led to a drop in voter confidence. However, what impact does mail voting have on voter confidence in isolation? I seek to answer this by leveraging the initial use of postal voting in Washington and Colorado through the Survey of the Performance of American Elections dataset and difference-in-differences design and two types of matching analyses. In doing so, I demonstrate that the implementation of vote by mail causes a significant decrease in voter confidence in both states. However, this decrease appears to be temporary, disappearing after only a single election cycle. These results shed light on the potential impact of recent expansions of postal voting in the United States while also furthering the debate around perceptions of electoral integrity in democratic systems.