Absentee / Vote By Mail Rejections: A Complex Problem with Complex Solutions
By Malen Cuturic ‘23 (exp.), EVIC Data Science Research Assistant and Paul Gronke, EVIC Director
Among the historic and unprecedented features of the November 2020 election was an enormous shift in the rate of voting by mail, from 21% in 2016 to 46% in 2020. As Nate Persily and Charles Stewart note, part of the “miracle” of 2020 was that local election administrators managed to adapt so rapidly to the demand for alternatives to in-person voting in the face of a global pandemic.
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Huge 2020 Spikes in Alternative Voting Methods
The U.S. Census Bureau just released data tables from their 2020 Voting and Registration Supplement, a biannual supplement to the monthly Current Population Survey that focuses on election related topics – particularly in the wake of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. These tables show what we’ve known intuitively and from other sources for a while: vote-by-mail rates were higher in 2020 than any year previously, as states across the country updated their absentee voting policies and voters adjusted to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vote Early, Vote In Person? New Patterns of Mail Ballot Returns Emerge in Multnomah County
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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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.
By Phil Keisling, who served as Oregon Secretary of State from 1991-99. The opinions and observations are solely his own views, and he takes full personal responsibility for any errors of fact, not to mention any predictions that prove wildly inaccurate!
During much of 2020, I’ve been promoting efforts to expand voter access to mailed out ballots, and to encourage states to adopt the “Vote at Home” model pioneered by Oregon, Colorado, and Washington, where 100% of active registered voters are automatically mailed their ballots.
Largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, 92 million voters this year received mailed out ballots — compared to just 42 million in 2016.
Some have asked what all this might mean for tonight’s election. How will these votes be counted? Will these votes be counted? How might the vote tallies tonight (and even later this week) change as votes are processed, counted and announced in key states’ widely varying election systems? So I thought I might share a few brief thoughts, which I’ve distilled into three categories: Continue reading
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.
Paul Manson, Research Director, and Paul Gronke, Director
Elections & Voting Information Center
Many in the elections and democracy space are concerned about the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise if many elections officials decide to depart from the field in response to increasing workloads, higher job stress, and a new environment of abuse, threats, and harassment.
We want to be mindful that departures and retirements after a Presidential and midterm may be a normal phenomena — LEOs over the years have told us that the period after a federal election cycle is a common time that an official, and their staff, will target for departures.
EVIC has been collecting survey data on planned retirements and departures since 2020. In each year, we asked respondents whether or not they were eligible to retire, and if so, were they planning on retiring before the 2024 election. For those respondents who were not eligible to retire, we also asked whether they had plans to leave the field.
In terms of eligibility, over one-third of officials reported they were eligible in 2020, and this number declined to 30% in 2022 — as would be expected if there was a wave of retirements after 2020. It’s also important to note that retirement after a presidential year is a normal phenomenon, and with no baseline comparisons, we don’t know if 2020 levels exceeded what would normally be expected.
We discovered that 13% planned to retire before 2024 (or almost half of those that are eligible), and about half of these respondents plan to retire this year. These numbers are high when compared to at least two benchmarks — the percent of the US workforce that retires annually (2%) or the federal workforce that retires annually (3.2%).
Finally, for those who were not eligible to retire, we asked if they were nonetheless considering leaving their position as a local elections official within the next two years. When we combine the planned retirements with the planned departures, we find that 21% of officials were planning to leave in 2020 and 18% were planning to leave in 2022.
Retirements and departures are very difficult to track because there is no comprehensive list of election officials in the United States. If such a list existed and was regularly updated, it may be possible to get a better purchase on retirements, departures, and lateral movements within the field, and over time in response to stressors.
Our results may be as good as we can get right now, and rely on survey self-reports. If accurate, and 18% of LEOs depart prior to 2024, that translates into anywhere between 1600 to 2000 LEOs.
By any measure, that’s a lot of expertise and knowledge that would need to be replaced in an area so critical to our democracy.
(The raw frequencies for these questions and the question wording can be found on our LEO Survey Page.)