Mail Vote Research Articles

Results of the preliminary guiding vote (“mail vote”) on proposals to amend the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants submitted to the XX International Botanical Congress, Madrid 2024

Results of the preliminary guiding vote (“mail vote”) on proposals to amend the <i>International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants</i> submitted to the <scp>XX</scp> International Botanical Congress, Madrid 2024

Partisanship is why people vote in person in a pandemic

AbstractObjectiveThe choice of voting methods has increasingly become a politicized, partisan issue. We ask: Can a nationalized partisan rhetoric cast doubt on vote‐by‐mail (VBM) despite years of experience and a raging pandemic?MethodUsing 2020 general election records in Colorado, an established all‐mail voting state, we analyze first the general choice of voting methods using supervised machine learning and then the choice to switch to in‐person voting despite having used VBM in previous cycles.ResultsThe choice of voting modes is mainly habitual; local variations of COVID‐19 hardly mattered. Republican partisanship played an important role in predicting “switchers” to in‐person voting; the probability was 5.2 percent conditional on being a Republican as opposed to 1.9 percent for a Democrat.ConclusionsThe results suggest that voting in person can be heavily polarized by partisan communication, despite being a health behavior in a pandemic and voters having experience with mail voting.

Assessing the Impact of the United States Postal System and Election Administration on Absentee and Mail Voting in the 2012 to 2020 U.S. Midterm and Presidential Elections

Absentee and mail voting were important ways of ballot casting during the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. Several studies (Burden et al. 2014, 2017; Ritter and Tolbert 2020) have established that the impact of absentee and mail voting is shaped by the presence of other election laws and broader features of a state's election administration. However, more study is needed to address whether and to what degree accessible versus restrictive features of a state's election administration impact the ability of individuals to vote in these ways. Using the accessible voting framework (Ritter and Tolbert 2020) and data from the 2018 and 2020 Catalist voter file as well as the 2012 to 2020 Cooperative Election Study, this study evaluates the impact of excuse required absentee, no-excuse absentee, permanent absentee, and universal mail voting laws on individual-level voting. In addition, this study evaluates whether state cure laws, voter identification laws, notary or witness signature requirements, and variations in United States Postal Service delivery times moderate the impacts of absentee and mail voting laws. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that the level of accessibility of state absentee and mail voting laws as well as their administration have significant effects on voter turnout. The results also reveal that higher performing U.S. Postal Service administration can enhance the impact of absentee and mail voting laws, particularly in states with the most restrictive mail voting laws.

Mail Voting and Voter Turnout

Does the expansion of voting by mail lead to higher turnout rates? Our thesis challenges the theoretical motivation underlying existing studies that expect merely a substitution effect, or worse, a decrease in turnout, in states that have more expansive convenience voting mechanisms in place, in particular, mail voting. The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped how we usually conceive of convenience voting, from the timing of the vote to the modality. But even before the 2020 election, we show voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Cooperative Election Study (CES), we find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.

The Impact of COVID-19, Election Policies, and Partisanship on Voter Participation in the 2020 U.S. Election

The COVID-19 pandemic had the potential to wreak havoc on elections. Democracies initiated varied policies to minimize health risks to voters and election workers. This study assesses the impact of voting policies, personal exposure to COVID, and partisanship on voter behavior in the 2020 U.S. general election. Using a comparative state-politics approach and new data, we demonstrate that exposure to COVID substantially influenced voter turnout, and election policies had a major effect on whether a voter cast a ballot by mail, early in-person, or in-person on Election Day. Unique circumstances, including the emergence of voting policies as a polarizing issue, also spawned a new partisan voting gap that is especially prominent among heavy news consumers. Compared to 2018, many more Democrats than Republicans abandoned Election Day voting in favor of mail voting.

Mitigating the Turnout Effects of Bad Weather With Early Voting: 1948–2016

We identify in-person early voting and no-excuse mail voting as antidotes for the depressing effect inclement weather has on voter turnout and the Republican dividend that accompanies rain and snow on Election Day. We offer and test an explanation for how voters utilize early voting to anticipate and avoid the costs of voting in bad weather. Replicating and extending Gomez et al (2007) analysis through the 2016 election, we confirm the remedial effect in-person early voting and to a lesser degree no-excuse mail voting has on turnout and the Republican advantage when bad weather coincides with Election Day. Our work makes an important contribution to understanding how election laws effect voter participation. We discuss how taking seriously treatment effect heterogeneity both in theoretical and empirical analyses might contribute to our understanding of the effects of election laws on voter participation.

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.

Trumped by Trump? Public Support for Mail Voting in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

How much is support for vote by mail (VBM) impacted by partisan considerations and personal considerations related to the COVID-19 pandemic? Using surveys of registered voters conducted in April and May 2020 designed to assess the support for various electoral reforms, we show that the overall support for expanding VBM in April 2020 falls sharply after just six weeks because Republicans became less worried about catching COVID-19, and unconcerned Republicans became far more opposed to VBM. These differences not only persisted, but actually increased even further between May and Election Day according to a survey done using a different methodology in November 2020. Public support for other reforms that were intended to make voting easier were largely unchanged, however. The pattern of opinion changes we document—perhaps a result of the intense partisan messaging that occurred during the time period of our study—highlights the importance of partisanship and personal considerations for public support for election reforms and also the widespread public support for most proposed reforms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vote-by-Mail Policy and the 2020 Presidential Election

Mail voting became unusually controversial in the 2020 presidential election. Many observers, including President Trump, believed that more accessible vote by mail would encourage higher turnout at the expense of Republicans. We examine the effect of mail ballot access policies in the 2020 pandemic election with county-level data and a difference-in-differences design. 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 produce more Democratic outcomes; 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.

American Youth and the Presidential Election -2020

The peak for the last 100 years voter turnout became one of the peculiarities of the 2020 presidential election. It revealed itself among every voter age cohort, among them traditionally absentee youth. Its electoral process participation growth can be linked with both its generational features and electoral campaign tactics of Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. A number of factors that helped democrats include personal antipathy of many young Americans towards D.Trump, mail voting expansion and sympathy of youth to J.Biden’s program social safety items.

The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 Election

The 2020 election was both a miracle and a tragedy. In the midst of a pandemic, election administrators pulled off a safe, secure, and professional election. Still, lies of voter fraud have cemented in the minds of tens of millions of Americans that the election was rigged. As the first wave of the pandemic overtook the nation right as the presidential election season was beginning, most states responded by delaying their primaries and maximizing opportunities to vote by mail. We review how the quick actions of many states led to salvaging of the primary season, but also led to two cautionary tales, from Wisconsin and New York, that illustrated the disasters that could befall both mail and in-person voters if the nation did not act quickly. We recount the combination of actions taken by governors, state legislators, health officials, judges, and civil society to adapt election administration to the exigent realities of the pandemic and to cope with the logistical challenges state and local election officials faced. We discuss metrics of success in the adaptations that took place — record-high turnout, widespread voter satisfaction, a doubling of mail voting without a concomitant increase in problems often associated with absentee ballots, and the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of new poll workers. We also explore how the competing narrative of dysfunction and a “stolen election,” propagated by President Trump and his supporters, led not only to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 1, but also to a historically deep chasm at the mass level between partisans in their trust of the election process and outcome. We conclude by noting that many states will be considering legislation that re-litigates the election by addressing non-problems, rather than building on the triumphs of the election.

Reconsidering Lost Votes by Mail

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. 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 2016—1.1% 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.

Reconsidering Lost Votes by Mail

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 4 and 6 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 paper revisits the one previous effort to estimate lost votes, by considering data available from the 2016 presidential election. Conceptually, the paper 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 paper draws on administrative records and surveys to provide an estimated number of lost mail votes in 2016. That estimate works out to approximately 1.4 million votes in 2016 — 4.0% of mail ballots cast and 1.0% of all ballots. These estimates are relevant in light of efforts to expand mail balloting in the 2020 presidential election. States that will see the greatest growth in mail ballots tended to have higher lost vote rates than those with vote-by-mail systems. This implies that a doubling or tripling of the number of mail ballots in 2020 will result in a disproportionate growth in the number of lost votes due to mail ballots.

Voting by Mail and Ballot Rejection: Lessons from Florida for Elections in the Age of the Coronavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic and its concomitant need for social distancing have increased the attractiveness of voting by mail. This form of voting is nonetheless not a panacea for election administration in the time of a public health crisis, as a widespread move to ballots cast by voting by mail risks exacerbating existing inequities in mail-in ballot rejection rates across voters and jurisdictions. This motivates our examination of the roughly 9.6 million and 8.2 million ballots cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections in Florida, respectively, including over 2.6 million vote-by-mail (VBM) ballots cast in each. Using a selection model that analyzes all ballots cast and those VBM ballots not counted in Florida in these two elections, we find that younger voters, voters not registered with a major political party, and voters in need of assistance when voting are disproportionately likely to have their VBM ballots not count. We also find disproportionately high rejection rates of mail ballots cast by Hispanic voters, out-of-state voters, and military dependents in the 2018 general election. Lastly, we find significant variation in the rejection rates of VBM ballots cast across Florida's 67 counties in the 2018 election, suggesting a non-uniformity in the way local election officials verify these ballots. As interest in expanding mail voting swells as a consequence of the novel coronavirus, protecting the rights of all voters to participate in electoral politics requires a characterization of the correlates of VBM ballot rejection with an eye toward considering how disparities in ballot rejection rates might be rectified.

Trumped by Trump? Public Support for Vote By Mail Voting in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

How much is support for vote by mail (VBM) impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, partisanship, and recent efforts by partisan elites to politicize discussions about expanding the use of VBM in November 2020? Using surveys of registered voters conducted in April and May 2020 we characterize how changing concerns about COVID 19 and increased partisan messaging affects public support for VBM. We show that the bipartisan support for VBM in April 2020 falls sharply after just six weeks because: Republicans became less worried about catching COVID-19, and unconcerned Republicans also became more opposed to VBM. The pandemic originally increased public support for expanding VBM to help combat the spread of COVID-19 - creating a relative unique opportunity to examine the public’s willingness to reconsider how elections are administered - but decreasing COVID-19 concerns among Republicans and increased opposition among unconcerned Republicans (perhaps due to increased partisan messaging) has combined to increase partisan divisions in otherwise historically high levels of public support for VBM.

Lost in the Mail? Vote be Mail and Voter Confidence

Recently, the use of vote-by-mail has been increasing in popularity, with Washington, Colorado, and Hawaii moving exclusively to mail-based election systems. While election reformers tout the various benefits of this change, what impact does mail voting have on voter confidence? I seek to answer this by by leveraging the implementation of postal voting in Washington and Colorado through the use of the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE) dataset, along with difference-in-differences design, genetic matching, Mahalanobis distance matching, and ordinal logistic regression analysis. 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 single election cycle. These results shed light on the potential impact of recent expansions of convenience voting in the United States, while also furthering the debate around perceptions of electoral integrity in democratic systems.