Who Likes to Vote by Mail?

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Author	Carolina Plescia,André Blais,Semra Sevi
Published date	01 July 2021
Date	01 July 2021
DOI	10.1177/1532673X211005684
Subject Matter	Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211005684

American Politics Research

2021, Vol. 49(4) 381 –385

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211005684

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Introduction

Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, some countries have

adapted their electoral rules to allow voting by mail (e.g.,

France and Bavaria in March 2020). For the 2020 Presidential

elections, many states in the United States modified their

electoral rules to facilitate voting by mail. The only states

where voters needed an absentee reason to vote by mail were

Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee,

and Texas.1

Much of the existing research has focused on whether or

not voting by mail reforms (as well as other convenience

voting reforms, such as automatic registration, advanced

voting, or internet voting) help increase turnout. In their

extensive review, Gronke et al. (2008) report that earlier

studies found no increase in turnout due to postal voting.

This is mainly because postal voting does not appear to

draw in new citizens or appeal to disempowered segments

of the population (Berinsky et al., 2001; Karp & Banducci,

2000). This conclusion however, remains contested (see

Barreto et al., 2006; Neeley & Richardson, 2001). A recent

study on the subject found that universal vote-by-mail does

not increase turnout (Thompson, 2020). However, still

focused exclusively on aggregate-level data, Bonica et al.

(2020) find that implementation of all-mail voting may

result in a boost in turnout especially among lower-propen-

sity voting groups such as younger voters. A parallel line of

research has studied public support for voting reforms,

including vote-by-mail (e.g., Alvarez et al., 2011; Burden

et al., 2011), also during COVID-19 (Clinton et al., 2020).

The aim of this paper is not to study the impact of mail (or

internet) voting on turnout or support for voting reforms. We

deal with a simple though basic question, which is whether

people would like to vote by mail or not. In a democracy, we

should pay attention to people’s views about various policy

issues but also about how elections should be conducted and

how citizens should cast their ballot. Knowing how much

voting by mail is liked may give us insights about its poten-

tial impact on turnout overall and among subgroups of the

population.

This is the gap we intend to fill with this short paper. In

particular, we examine four contending hypotheses about

who likes to vote by mail: the first concerns age while the

remaining ones are related to political interest, race, and ide-

ology, respectively. We do so using original data we collected

in February 2020 in the United States. Hence, our data col-

lection took place before postal voting became a partisan

issue and as such we are able to study what did people think

before the topic became controversial and highly polarized

(Montellaro, 2020; Wise & Corse, 2020). The survey ques-

tion we rely on asks respondents if they prefer to cast a ballot

at a polling station, over the internet or by mail. By including

both internet and mail as alternative voting options to the

polling station we aim to disentangle convenience (both

alternatives are presumably more convenient than polling

station voting) from novelty (internet is more novel than mail

and polling station voting).2

1005684APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211005684American Politics ResearchPlescia et al.

research-article2021

1University of Vienna, Wien, Austria

2University of Montréal, QC, Canada