Abstract
A âlost voteâ occurs when a voter does all that is asked of her, and yet her vote is uncounted in the final tally. Estimating the magnitude of lost votes in American presidential elections has followed the work of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which initially estimated the magnitude of lost votes in the 2000 presidential election, due to failures of voter registration, polling-place management, and voting technologies, to be between four and six million out of 107 million cast that year. Because of data and conceptual limitations, lost vote estimates have tended to focus on in-person voting, ignoring lost votes due to mail voting. This article revisits the one previous effort to estimate lost votes, by considering data available from the 2016 presidential election. Conceptually, the article highlights how differing mail-ballot legal regimes produce lost mail votes in different ways, and at different rates, on account of differing laws, regulations, and practices. Empirically, the article reviews the availability of data that could put hard numbers on the extent of the problem of lost votes by mail. The most reliable data is administrative, and documents that nearly 377,000 ballots were rejected for counting in 2016â1.1% of mail ballots and 0.33% of all votes cast. Less reliable is data that would clarify lost ballots because of problems with the postal service and other difficult-to-measure administrative processes. Nonetheless, the rate of ballot rejections is relevant in light of efforts to expand mail balloting in the 2020 presidential election. States that will be expanding the use of mail ballots had higher rates of ballot rejections in 2016 than those that mailed ballots to all voters. If these states that are new to expanded vote-by-mail do not lower their rejection rates, the number of rejected ballots in 2020 could triple, compared to 2016. This expanded number of rejected ballots will be especially significant should a recount be required to determine the winner of the election.
Highlights
A ‘lost vote’ occurs when a voter does all that is asked of her, and yet her vote is uncounted in the final tally
Estimating the magnitude of lost votes in American presidential elections has followed the work of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which initially estimated the magnitude of lost votes in the 2000 presidential election, due to failures of voter registration, polling-place management, and voting technologies, to be between four and six million out of 107 million cast that year
As the use of mail balloting has increased in the United States, it has proceeded along different policy tracks that require us to consider carefully what various administrative statistics imply if we are to take the underlying idea of lost votes seriously
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to voting by mail in the United States. Despite the political ruckus that has been kicked up by President Trump’s aggressive opposition to expanded vote-by-mail options, it appears clear that the number of mail ballots cast in the November 2020 election will vastly exceed past levels This has certainly been true during the presidential primary season. As the use of mail balloting has increased in the United States, it has proceeded along different policy tracks that require us to consider carefully what various administrative statistics imply if we are to take the underlying idea of lost votes seriously This is especially true when we examine the utility of the measure of unreturned mail ballots as an indicator of ballots lost in transit by the postal service (see Section 4.2). I end the article with a brief discussion of how the expansion of mail balloting in 2020 will expand that number, both in terms of raw votes and as a percentage of mail ballots cast
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