Mail-in voting rates drop but early in-person voting is a hit : NPR
On this file photo, the electoral workers prepare voting ballots by mail to count at the processing center of the Bulletins of Los Angeles on the eve of the electoral day, on November 4, 2024, in the city of industry, in California.
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Fewer Americans voted by post in the elections of last year, while more voters adopted the vote in person before election day.
New data from the American Elections Assistance Commission revealed that the 2020 presidential election remains a high brand for mail voting during a national election.
According to a national survey of those responsible for local and state elections that the agency leads after each major election, “voting by mail represented 30.3% of the participation rate for elections of 2024”, which is a decrease compared to the 2020 elections when the ballots per mail represented 43% of the participation rate.
However, the Commission noted that the share of mail’s vote last year is “greater than the percentage of the electorate which voted by mail during pre-countryic elections”. The participation rate has also remained above pre-countryic levels. During the 2024 elections, almost 65% of the citizen age population participated in the general elections, which is the second highest participation rate in the last five presidential elections.
In this file photo, voters head for a survey to vote on the last early voting day for the 2024 elections on November 1, 2024 in Atlanta. A new federal report shows that the vote in person increased from 2020 to 2024.
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Voting popularity by mail falls
The EAC noted that the vote in person had started to see “a resurgence” in 2022, while the vote by mail saw a corresponding drop that year.
“For the general elections of 2024, more than two -thirds of voters voted in person before or on election day,” according to the report. “About three out of 10 voters voted by mail.”
Commissioner Donald Palmer told NPR that voters “often have their own preferences” with regard to voting methods, but this can change over time if other methods are available to them.
“And therefore electoral officials, what we remove is that we must be prepared and be ready to facilitate different forms of voting,” he said.
There are several reasons why the experts expected that voting by mail is as popular as during the pandemic. On the one hand, many states have expanded voting by mail for health and security reasons in the 2020 elections, but some returned to more limited programs before the 2024 elections.
In addition, in the wake of the 2020 elections, President Trump and republican legislators across the country also disseminated a disinformation aimed at discrediting the vote by mail, which has finally led to a series of laws made in recent years which create new limits to this method of voting.
The Republicans adopted voting ballots by mail in the 2024 elections, encouraging voters to “put your vote” by obtaining it early, unlike previous elections.
Despite efforts to limit voting by mail in certain states, overall access to the most of the Americans has developed since 2020.
More voters have chosen to vote early in person
One of the voting methods that has become more popular in recent years is early vote in person. During the last presidential election, more than 158 million voting bulletins were spent and counted and the majority of these ballots were seen in person – 35.2% of these votes were expressed before election day and 37.4% on the day of the ballot.
According to the EAC, “for the first time, all the States said they had offered a form of voting in person before election day”.
Palmer said that he thought that voting in person early is one of the most practical voting options for many Americans.
“It is really practical to take one of these days before the poll and vote early, especially if you have to travel or if you have to be absent or work,” he said. “So I think it’s just time to take advantage of the practical vote.”
Palmer said there were a lot of light points in the report – especially on the voting security side. At this stage, around 98% of voting jurisdictions have a paper track for their voting systems. In addition, the national rejection rate of voting ballots per mail was only 1.2%, which has still remained low in recent years.
Recruitment of election workers
In this file photo, a worker of the polls wraps stickers while working inside a FEMA tent used as voting site on November 5, 2024, in Morganton, NC
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An area where there is still work to be done, said Palmer is to recruit “the next generation of election workers”. The aging workforce of election employees was a continuous problem during the elections. According to the EAC, the main demographic work at survey sites is between 61 and 70 years old.
Due to the pandemic, the younger demography helped in the 2020 elections. But it came back a little, Palmer said in the last elections.
“It will be a challenge for us as a community to continue to recruit people who are really the backbone of the elections,” he said. “So we really need the new generation. I guess Gen X must intensify and start filling out some of these roles while the older population retires or put the keys of the office from the office.”
