Mail Ballot Research Articles

Congressional Committee Finds Fault with Mail Ballot Procedures

During the height of the COVID‐19 pandemic, mail balloting became the primary method of conducting union elections. Now, although usage of mail balloting has waned, this method remains a much‐used tool of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), particularly with regional offices dealing with budgetary problems and short staffing. Indeed, the NLRB has suggested that remote voting should be the way of the future. However, such efforts carry significant risks of unfairness for employers and employees, as concluded in a recent report by the Committee on Education and the Workforce for the U.S. House of Representatives.

NLRB Backs Down from Mail Ballot Elections

NLRB Backs Down from Mail Ballot Elections

Another Nail in the Coffin for Manual Elections

Before the pandemic, mail ballot elections were a rarity before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In‐person, manual elections were recognized as the superior means to allow employees an opportunity to exercise their Section 7 rights and cast a ballot for or against union representation. The risk of fraud was largely nonexistent, given that ballots were given only to employees who had been checked in by union and employer observers, and the entire process—from handing the ballot to the employee through the final count—was overseen by direct observation of an NLRB agent. Further, an election that spanned only one day was much less open to manipulation than an election that spans weeks, which many mail ballot union elections do.

Blocks as Geographic Discontinuities: The Effect of Polling-Place Assignment on Voting

AbstractA potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast an in-person ballot, including the costs associated with identifying and traveling to a polling place. In order to investigate how these costs affect voter turnout, we introduce two quasi-experimental designs that can be used to study how the political participation of registered voters is affected by differences in the relative distance that registrants must travel to their assigned Election Day polling place and whether their polling place remains at the same location as in a previous election. Our designs make comparisons of registrants who live on the same residential block, but are assigned to vote at different polling places. We find that living farther from a polling place and being assigned to a new polling place reduce in-person Election Day voting, but that registrants largely offset for this by casting more early in-person and mail ballots.

Mail Ballots—Timing Is Everything

The intent of elections under the National Labor Relations Act is to allow employees the opportunity to choose for themselves whether to be represented for purposes of collective bargaining. Before 2020, such elections were generally simple. On a particular day and at a particular time, employees would appear at a balloting location—usually the workplace—and cast their secret ballots. The pandemic accelerated the use of mail ballots in an effort to meet the same goal. However, as many of us are too painfully aware, the U.S. Postal Service is occasionally less than efficient in getting mail from point A to point B. What happens when that mail contains time‐sensitive mail ballots? According to the National Labor Relations Board in CenTrio Energy South LLC, 371 NLRB No. 94 (2022), nothing happens. The employees are left out of luck.

Vote-by-mail policy and the 2020 presidential election

Mail voting became unusually controversial in the 2020 presidential election. Many observers, including former President Trump, believed that more accessible vote by mail would encourage higher turnout at the expense of Republicans. While the literature has tested some of these claims, it has not offered a more comprehensive causal assessment of vote-by-mail policy, nor has any study looked at these questions in the context of the extraordinary 2020 election. We examine the effect of mail ballot access policies both before and during the 2020 pandemic election with county-level data and a variety of methodological approaches. Our results suggest that making it easier to vote by mail—especially mailing every voter a ballot—generally does increase turnout, both before and during the 2020 election. By contrast, the same policies do not have robust partisan effects, and in many models, they tilt the results in a more Republican direction. While some of our findings are sensitive to model specification, the positive turnout effect of mailing every voter a ballot is robust to many alternative approaches. The confirmation of the existing understanding of universally mailed ballots suggests the basic dynamics of the reform are immune to a wide range of disruptive forces.

Defizite bei der Briefwahl in Deutschland – und fünf Vorschläge zur Abhilfe

In light of the growing interest in voting by mail, political science research has increasingly focused on this important aspect of democratic participation . Studies in this field have scrutinized the practical implementation of the mail ballot . A systematic review of the lit- erature on the practice of voting by mail shows possible reforms . Five approaches are dis- cussed, (1) a more generous deadline for submitting postal votes, (2) simplifying the mail- in ballots, (3) translating them, (4) personal notifications in case of rejected mail ballots, and (5) incorporating data about rejected mail ballots into the official election results . In this way, the number of erroneous votes can be reduced and more transparency about the voting process can be secured . It is also required as a measure of citizen-oriented public administration

Confidentiality of Mail Ballots

Confidentiality of Mail Ballots

Convenient, but Prone to Error: Invisible Uncounted Mail Ballots

Seit Jahren erfreut sich die Briefwahl steigender Beliebtheit. Während Wählerinnen und Wähler die Bequemlichkeit der Briefwahl schätzen, bleibt in der öffentlichen Debatte häufig unbeachtet, wie anfällig Wahlbriefe für Formfehler sind. Aus vielerlei Gründen werden eingegangene Wahlbriefe von den Wahlleitungen zurückgewiesen. Da diese Stimmen in Deutschland als nicht abgegeben gewertet werden, unterschätzt der in der Wahlstatistik berichtete Anteil ungültiger Briefwahlstimmen das Phänomen nicht gewerteter Briefwahlstimmen ganz erheblich. Der in dieser Arbeit geschätzte Anteil ungewerteter Briefwahlstimmen liegt zwischen 3,2 und 4,0 % und somit deutlich über dem typischen Anteil ungültiger Urnenwahlstimmen. Die Arbeit schließt mit der Forderung, die Zahl der zurückgewiesenen Wahlbriefe künftig in der Wahlstatistik auszuweisen, um Wählerinnen und Wählern eine reflektierte Entscheidung über das Risiko einer ungewerteten Briefwahlstimme zu ermöglichen.

Educating Voters About Mail Ballot Elections

Even as the effect of the pandemic wanes (at least temporarily), the NLRB continues to varying degrees to conduct elections by mail ballot. This election method is unlikely to retreat completely to pre‐pandemic levels given Chairman McFerran's stated interest in expanding the use of remote ballot processes. With that, it is essential that employers educate employees on the complicated process involved in successfully submitting an election ballot by mail. A recent decision by the NLRB in College Bound Dorchester, Inc., Case No. 01‐RC‐261667 (June 25, 2021) highlights the importance of mail ballot procedures and, specifically, the signature of employees on the ballot envelope.

Lost in the Mail? Vote by Mail and Voter Confidence

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.

Why Do Election Results Change after Election Day? The “Blue Shift” in California Elections

The counting of votes in contemporary American elections is usually not completed on Election Night. There has been an increasing tendency for vote shares to shift toward Democratic candidates after Election Day in general elections, in particular, in recent U.S. elections. Leveraging important snapshots of precinct-level election returns and precinct-level demographic and political composition from Orange County, California, we conduct the first full-fledged analysis of the potential drivers of vote share shifts. Using an original large-scale post-election survey and unique snapshots of individual-level administrative records, we also provide the first analysis of the characteristics of voters whose ballots were tallied later versus earlier in the process. Far from being anomalous, our results indicate that the shifts are consistent with underlying precinct voter compositions and the order of precinct and mail ballot processing at the individual level in accordance with election administration practices. We find the same driving forces in North Carolina and Colorado, and discuss the consequences of the “Blue Shift” for public concerns about election integrity as states push policy changes regarding access to voting by mail.

NLRB Chairman Open to Election Changes

The pandemic created uncounted instances of upheaval in numerous contexts, including NLRB union elections – elections that at first were suspended, and then largely conducted by mail. Given recent comments by Chairman McFerran, it is unlikely that the concept of remote elections will fully dissipate once the pandemic fully passes. She has expressed an interest in further development of remote options for the conducting of elections. Balloting outside the presence of an NLRB agent gives right to unique concerns, not the least of which is improper influence over employees when casting their votes. The recent decision in Professional Transportation, 370 NLRB No. 132 (2021), sheds light on the NLRB's perspective concerning mail ballot solicitation.

Vote-by-mail Ballot Rejection and Experience with Mail-in Voting

Although most ballots in the United States have historically been cast in-person, Americans are increasingly voting by mail, a trend that accelerated in the 2020 General Election. Mail ballots can be rejected after being cast, and our analysis of the Florida general elections of 2016, 2018, and 2020 shows that voters inexperienced with mail voting disproportionately submit ballots that end up rejected due to (1) late arrival at elections offices or (2) signature defects on return envelopes. Inexperienced mail voters are up to three times more likely to have their ballots rejected compared to experienced mail voters, and this inexperience penalty varies by a voter’s party registration, race/ethnicity, and age. Our findings hold when controlling for additional voter characteristics and geographical fixed effects. The effect of inexperience on the likelihood of vote-by-mail ballot rejection risks exacerbating existing inequities in political representation already faced by younger and racial/ethnic minority voters.

One Shift, Two Shifts, Red Shift, Blue Shift: Reported Election Returns in the 2020 Election

Shifting vote margins in the hours and days following the close of polls was a highlighted issue in the 2020 election. The tendency of vote margins in recent presidential elections to trend in favor of the Democratic presidential candidate as the count proceeds has been previously studied and given the label “blue shift.” We address how these shifts occurred during the 2020 election with contemporaneous National Election Pool (NEP) data reported by county. States were slower to report overall vote counts if they had large volumes of mail ballots, prohibited preprocessing mail ballots, and allowed mail ballots to arrive after Election Day. We also find that both between- and within-county differences drove partisan trends in the 2020 vote count. Counties Biden won took longer to complete their counts than counties Trump won. Within the average county, Biden’s votes took longer to count completely than Trump’s. Nonetheless, in the first couple of hours after polls closed, there was actually a disproportionate number of Biden votes reported, which we show were likely due to preprocessed mail ballots being reported first.

Update: Mail Ballot Elections

Traditionally, the NLRB has not supported mail ballot elections for a number of reasons. As noted in Aspirus Keweenaw, 370 NLRB No. 45 (2020), manual elections provide for an added layer of security as an NLRB agent is physically present to monitor and enforce rules to ensure a fair election. They also encourage greater voter participation, with the NLRB recently finding that voter participation increases 20–30% in manual elections as compared to mail ballot elections.

How do Americans want elections to be run during the COVID-19 crisis?

To inform the vital conversation among the nation’s political leaders, elections administrators, and scholars about how to hold a safe, accessible, and fair election in November 2020, this article reports how a sample of 5612 eligible American voters, surveyed 8–10 April, wanted to see the election run during the COVID-19 crisis. We embedded a randomized experiment presenting respondents with truthful summaries of the projections of two teams of scientists about the pandemic. Our descriptive findings show that in November 2020, four in 10 eligible voters would have preferred to cast their ballot by mail rather than in person and that a majority of respondents favored policies expanding mail voting. Our experimental findings show that respondents who read the scientific projections were more likely to prefer voting by mail, were more likely to trust that a mail ballot would be counted accurately, and were more likely to favor holding the election entirely by mail.

Voting Experiences, Perceptions of Fraud, and Voter Confidence

ObjectiveAssuring voter confidence is important for the legitimacy of democratic elections. In this article, we test four hypotheses about the correlates of voter confidence at various levels of election administration.MethodsWe take advantage of a large online survey of registered voters in a single election jurisdiction, Orange County (CA), which was implemented immediately after the November 2018 midterm elections. We measure voting experience and social media usage using item response theory as well as voters' perceptions of various election or voter fraud, and estimate their association with voter confidence via logistic regression models.ResultsOur results show that voters who cast mail ballots are less confident about their own votes being counted correctly than in‐person voters. For both types of voters, those who have poor experiences with the voting process are much less likely to report confidence in the election. We also find that voters who have strong concerns about election fraud are less likely to report being confident in the election. Our last result indicates that information from news and social media is associated with a decline in voter confidence in election administration at the national level.ConclusionGiven the many conversations about election fraud that have occurred since the 2016 presidential election, this research provides important implications for election administration in future elections in the United States.

Determinants of Rejected Mail Ballots in Georgia’s 2018 General Election

Because of the COVID-19 threat to in-person voting in the November 2020 election, state and local election officials have pivoted to mail-in voting as a potential solution. This method of voting—while safe from a public health standpoint—comes with its own set of problems, as increased use of mail voting risks amplifying existing discrepancies in rejected mail ballots. While some mail ballot rejections are to be expected, a lack of uniformity in whose ballots get rejected among subgroups of voters—whether for mistakes on a ballot return envelope (BRE) or lateness—raise concerns about equal representation. We draw on official statewide voter file and mail-in ballot data from the 2018 midterm election in Georgia, a state that until the pandemic did not have widespread use of mail voting, to test whether some voters are more likely to cast a mail ballot that does not count. Most importantly, we distinguish between ballots rejected for lateness and those rejected for a mistake on the return envelope. We find that newly registered, young, and minority voters have higher rejection rates compared with their counterparts.

The Protecting The Right To Organize (Pro) Act - A Major Step Toward Restoring The Right To Organise For US Workers

US labour law has failed American workers seeking to organise unions at their workplaces and bargain collectively with their employers. The National Labor Relations Act was adopted in 1935 with great promise, establishing as national labour policy the encouragement of organising and collective bargaining by private sector workers. But the law was weakened by the passage of the 1947 TaftHartley Act, and employers quickly realised the law had no teeth and could be violated without consequence. As a result, employers learned to fight and defeat worker organising with a variety of tactics both legal and illegal1, knowing that they would face no real penalty if they were found to have violated the law. Other changes adopted by Congress and the courts gave employers greater leverage in the collective bargaining process. Courageous workers are still able to overcome a system that is stacked against them and organise unions, but many more are stymied by employer anti-union campaigns. As a result, only one in 12 private sector workers in the United States is represented by a union – the lowest level since the passage of the NLRA. Yet nearly half of all private sector workers say they would join a union if given the chance. There is a 400% gap2 between the percentage of workers who want a union and the percentage of workers who have one. The US labour movement is unified in supporting and promoting the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act to correct some of the fundamental flaws and weaknesses in the NLRA. The PRO Act is by far the most significant and comprehensive piece of labour law legislation in decades. It is far more comprehensive than the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which failed to pass during the presidency of Barack Obama (although the PRO Act does not contain the majority sign up/card check recognition provision that was a centrepiece of EFCA). The PRO Act addresses major structural flaws in the NLRA on both the organising process and the bargaining process, as summarised below. Preventing Employer Interference in the Election Process and Putting Workers and the NLRB in Charge One of the major flaws in current US labour law is that it fails to rein in employer interference in the election process. As a result, workers do not have a free and fair choice over whether to form a union – their choice is made in an environment where employers hold too much sway and control. Take as just one recent example Amazon’s conduct during the organising campaign in Bessemer, Alabama. Amazon forced workers to attend numerous mandatory meetings where the company delivered its anti-union message. Meanwhile, union organisers had no similar access to workers and had to reach them outside the warehouse. Amazon went so far as to persuade county officials to change the timing on traffic lights outside the facility to give union organisers less time to talk with workers when they were driving to and from work. Amazon also manipulated the election process by insisting on adding thousands of workers to the bargaining unit3, which delayed the process and diluted the union’s support. Amazon fought the union’s request for a mail ballot election, arguing that the election should be on-site under Amazon’s watchful eye. Even though Amazon lost that argument, it persuaded the US Postal Service to install a mailbox at the Bessemer facility, and there is evidence that Amazon representatives had keys to the mailbox – thus undermining any notion of a free, secret ballot election for workers. These tactics are all too common. Employers hold captive audience meetings in 9 out of 10 organising campaigns, and they are charged with breaking the law in four out of 10 campaigns. Employers risk breaking the law because they know there are no real consequences. There are literally no financial penalties in current labour law for violations, and no compensatory damages for workers who are illegally fired for being pro-union. The PRO Act remedies this situation in a number of ways. It bans captive audience meetings, and establishes real penalties – including individual liability for corporate officials – when employers break the law. It makes clear that the timing and mechanics...