We Should Never Have to Vote in Person Again

As the coronavirus continues to spread throughout the country, there are growing concerns about whether in-person voting can be conducted safely in the months ahead, including for the November presidential election. A huge expansion of mail voting is one way to ensure that participating in democracy won’t undermine public health.

The idea of “all-mail voting” is straightforward: Every registered voter gets sent a ballot via mail to their home address, then after making their choices, voters mail it back; and those who want to still travel to vote in person can do so. In the midst of this pandemic, it’s an adjustment that every state legislature should try to make.

But should we expand mail voting beyond the Covid-19 crisis?

Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, and Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at M.I.T., argue in a recent article, “States should approach this situation as an emergency, not as an opportunity to make long-term changes to election policy.” We disagree.

Our new research, published yesterday, shows that elections with all-mail voting increase turnout among everyone, especially groups that tend to vote less frequently. Those results merit permanent, wide-scale shifts. Currently, registered voters automatically get a ballot by mail in five states: Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado and Hawaii. A few other states have all-mail voting in small jurisdictions, and California has been gradually rolling it out.

Before this year, the results of research into all-mail voting’s turnout effect had been mixed. Past studies of all-mail voting, mostly of its early years in Oregon and California, argued that it does boost turnout, but mainly for those who already vote. If that remained true, then mail voting could actually exacerbate present inequalities in political participation.

So when we began our research, we wouldn’t have been surprised by unequal outcomes. Young people, notorious for their low turnout rates, use traditional mail less than other groups. And people of color — who have been subjected to centuries of voter discrimination — might be skeptical of adopting big changes to an electoral system that has disadvantaged them.

Our findings show, however, that low-turnout groups are the very groups that stand to benefit most from all-mail voting. Focusing on Colorado’s recent switch to vote-by-mail in 2013 and using the voter file — a comprehensive record of who turns out in American elections — we find that turnout goes up among everyone, especially the historically disenfranchised: young people, voters of color, less-educated people and blue-collar workers.

In Colorado, a traditional swing state, ballots are mailed to all registered voters, who can then choose to mail back their completed ballot or drop it in one of many secure collection boxes. (Denver alone has about 30 throughout the city.) Or voters take it to a county vote center, staffed with personnel, to cast their ballot in person. Vote centers are open during an early voting period as well as on Election Day.

To study the effect of all-mail voting in Colorado, we first looked at how turnout changed after the state instituted all-mail voting. We then compared that with how turnout changed during the same period in similar nearby states. We found that all-mail voting has a tremendously large effect, boosting overall voting rates in Colorado by more than 9 percentage points.

But the good news in the state doesn’t stop there. Under all-mail voting, youth turnout increases by 16 percentage points. Blue-collar workers see a 10 percentage-point jump in turnout. People without a high school diploma are 9.6 percentage points more likely to vote. And voters of color benefit immensely: Our research finds a 13 percentage-point turnout boost for African-Americans, a 10 percentage-point boost for Latino voters and an 11 percentage-point increase for Asian-Americans.

All-mail voting also helps reduce the wealth-turnout gap. Households with less than $10,000 in wealth see a 10 percentage-point turnout boost from all-mail voting, while the effect for those with $250,000 or more in wealth is about half that size.

The explanation is simple: Mail voting makes participating in elections a lot easier. This is particularly helpful for young people, who disproportionately cite time constraints as their reason for not voting.

We also examine the inevitable question on politicians’ minds: What will this do for my re-election prospects? Looking at voters by political party, we find that Democrats and Republicans benefit about the same amount: around 8 percentage points.

This is somewhat surprising, given that groups historically associated with voting for Democrats benefit most from mail voting. One explanation may be that in Colorado, young people are choosing to register as independents rather than as Democrats. In fact, we found that Colorado’s shift to vote-by-mail increased the turnout of independents by 12 percentage points, more than among members of either major party.

It should be noted that while our findings suggest national voting by mail could do wonders alone, voting experts rate Colorado’s system so highly because it also allows for same-day registration. This ensures that people who miss the state’s registration deadline for mail voting can still register and vote in person. (Colorado also proactively updates voter addresses using the United States Postal Service’s National Change of Address database and, as of 2017, provides automatic voter registration throughout the state.)

Colorado also had years to prepare for its expansion of mail voting. Last-minute changes could undermine trust and depress turnout. This is why a leading consortium of civil rights groups called for primaries to continue as scheduled in the face of Covid-19. Election administrators looking to institute mail voting in time for November should be careful to communicate all changes — and the reasoning behind them — to voters of all backgrounds.

For most voters, mail voting is not a partisan issue. The reform draws strong support among both Democratic and Republican voters, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Support is even stronger among Democrats and Republicans living in states that already have all-mail voting. All-mail voting appears to be that rarest of democracy reforms: a shift that helps everyone get more involved, that reduces inequities and that attracts support across parties — if only at the grass-roots level.

A number of Republican leaders — most notably President Trump — have come out in opposition to mail voting. To justify their position, many have bandied the Republican Party’s evergreen excuse for opposing democracy reforms: the specter of voter fraud. This is a bad-faith take.

As election security experts have pointed out, fraud is exceptionally rare, hard to commit without getting caught and nearly impossible to do on the scale necessary to affect election results. And because mail voting leaves behind a paper trail — which election officials can audit to verify that votes were counted as cast — it may actually be even more secure than in-person voting.

There’s solid evidence that Republican politicians may not believe their own rhetoric on this issue. Some Republican legislatures recently introduced proposed changes that allow for mail voting in November 2020, but only for those age 65 and older, or those in the military, both of whom more reliably support Republican candidates.

At this point, the burden of argument regarding the merit of mail voting should be on its opponents, not its proponents. Our research suggests policymakers looking to to maximize democratic participation can expand mail voting ahead of this challenging November election — and also put it on the books for years to come.

Charlotte Hill is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Jacob Grumbach is a professor of political science at the University of Washington. Adam Bonica and Hakeem Jefferson are professors of political science at Stanford.

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