Mandatory mail-in voting hurts neither Democratic nor Republican candidates
Mandatory mail-in voting leads to a slight uptick in voter turnout — for both Democrats and Republicans. That’s the conclusion that researchers came to after analyzing more than 40 million individual voting records from Utah and Washington — two states that have switched from in-person voting to almost exclusively mail-in voting over several years — as well as nearly 30 years of nationwide county-level voting data. The finding, published August 26 in Science Advances, suggests the current political zeitgeist that mail-in voting benefits one party over another is false, says political scientist Michael Barber of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. When voters cast ballots by mail, he says, “neither party is hurt.” Although Utah and Washington do not reflect voting patterns in the country as a whole, the authors note, because Washington leans blue and Utah red, the two states demonstrate how mail-in voting could affect voter turnout by party. With the country...