Resources

This paper provides a history of military voting by absentee ballot.

Philadelphia officials randomly sent 46,960 Philadelphia registrants postcards encouraging them to apply to vote by mail in the lead-up to the June 2020 primary election. While the intervention increased the likelihood a registrant cast a mail ballot by 0.4 percentage points —or 3%—many of these additional mail ballots counted only because a last-minute policy intervention allowed most mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to count.

This analysis shows that the implementation of vote by mail causes a significant decrease in voter confidence in Washington and Colorado. However, this decrease appears to be temporary, disappearing after only a single election cycle.

Focusing on natural experiments in Texas and Indiana, this research finds that 65-year-olds turned out at nearly the same rate as 64-year-olds, despite the fact that only 65-year-olds could vote absentee without an excuse in these states. Being just old enough to vote no-excuse absentee did not substantially increase Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout.

This 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.

All mail voting in Colorado had a positive overall turnout effect of approximately 8 percentage points—translating into an additional 900,000 ballots being cast between 2014 and 2018.

With Maine as a case study, the research shows that, in the past four general elections, over 10% of vote-by-mail ballots arrived at local elections offices either on Election Day itself or one day earlier. Moreover, of the vote-by-mail ballots most vulnerable to postal delivery disruptions, a greater share of them were cast by unaffiliated voters and Democrats than by Republicans.

This guide takes a comprehensive look at ballot processing, tracing ballots from intake to tally and archiving, providing election officials with process descriptions, tracking forms, supply lists, and work roles. Election officials can edit this guide to match unique local/state needs and can use the guide to support staff trainings or helping observers understand what they’re watching.

Research finds adopting VBM increases turnout because it reduces the physical costs of voting for all voters and mitigates the information costs of voting conditional on the types of voters and salience of elections.

Using individual-level voter data from a 2020 Washington State election, the research shows that voters are more likely to use the nearest drop box to their residence relative to other drop boxes. In Washington’s 2020 August primary, 52% of drop box voters in our data used their nearest drop box.

This United States Postal Service (USPS) report outlines the scope of election mail handled by USPS and identifies key service challenges including poorly designed ballot envelopes, tight state deadlines that don't align with postal delivery windows, and inconsistent postmarking requirements. The report identifies the "extraordinary measures" taken by USPS during election periods to effectively process and deliver election mail.

Authors collect data from 1996-2018 on all three U.S. states who implemented universal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. They find that: (1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party's share of turnout; (2) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party's vote share; and (3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates.