Vote Early, Vote In Person? Multnomah County Voters Take Advantage of Long Voting Period and Ballot Drop Boxes
For a full vote-by-mail jurisdiction, Multnomah County voters love voting in person! Data from the county shows that over half of November 2020 voters returned their ballots by hand at a drop box (rather than through the mail), and voters in precincts near drop boxes are most likely to utilize official drop sites. Despite changes to people’s daily habits in the pandemic, voters here really enjoy the convenience and security of dropping their ballots off in person at a neighborhood drop box. This is the first of two posts exploring data from Multnomah County about where and when voters returned their ballots in November 2020.
Election Morning Update: Oregon, Washington Overtake 2016 Ballots Cast
As of this morning, Oregon and Washington voters have returned more ballots than they did in the 2016 election.
Friday Update: Ballot Returns in Oregon Return to Historical Rate
After a surge of ballots returned last week, this week we saw the number of ballots returned daily in Oregon drop to about the same rate as they were returned in previous years. Still ahead of us, however, are the three days when turnout has historically been the highest: Friday, Monday, and Tuesday. In previous years, around a quarter of all ballots have been received by elections offices on Election Day.
Oregonians Returning Ballots Earlier than in Previous Years
Oregonians are eager to vote in the upcoming November 3 election. As of the morning of October 21, nearly 2 weeks before Election Day, almost 500,000 of the 3 million registered voters in the state have already returned their ballot. This is 24% of the 2 million ballots cast in the 2016 general election.
We appear about halfway down in this posting:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-coronavirus-could-change-how-we-vote-in-2020-and-beyond/
I’m following news coverage of the first election with early voting in New York State. I’ve been studying early voting for over fifteen years, and have dealt with a lot of journalists over time. It’s a learning experience for journalists new to the early voting “beat.”
One pattern that we see in almost every state is that older voters gravitate toward early voting (though this pattern typically changes as the system matures, as voters and campaigns adapt to early voting).
But otherwise, these first patterns are always fascinating. The linked story is from Erie County, NY does a nice job unpacking why elderly voters are so heavily represented among the early vote.
First, it looks like most early voting centers were places in senior citizen homes and community centers. And voter response is predictably high among those who frequent these locations.
Second, it’s a low profile election, and these are typically dominated by frequent voters, and elderly voters are far more likely to be frequent voters.
Good job, Buffalo NPR, WBFO!
There’s a good story at 538.com by Nathaniel Rakich on the turnout effects of automatic voter registration. He does a good job identifying the boundaries of the potential effects, and is sensitive to the difficult problem of identifying the counter-factual.
Gronke quote about behavioral economics and opt-in / opt-out implementation:
And then there’s the behavioral economics of it all. Reed College professor Paul Gronke told FiveThirtyEight that social science research has generally found that an opt-out system (like AVR) is more effective than an opt-in one (like having to actively register yourself).
The research continues!
In our last post, we looked at ballot return methods among Multnomah County, Oregon voters in the November 2020 election. As the most populous county in the first state to adopt vote by mail in 2000, Multnomah is an interesting case to explore voter use and adaptation over two decades of voting by mail. November 2020 is also interesting because the state began to pay for return postage as of August 2019, leading one well-known advocacy group to describe Oregon as a state where “every mail box is a drop box.” But is this actually how voters responded?
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