COVID-19 has forced much of the country to reevaluate the way it does business, and elections are no exception. We’ve already seen primaries postponed in 15 states and cancelled in New York. Wisconsin’s in-person primary at the start of April saw shortages of polling places and poll workers, as well as difficulties managing a tenfold increase in absentee ballot requests. All of this has unfolded in an atmosphere of partisan bickering about how to best assure a safe, secure, and accessible November election.
While many decisions about elections are being made at the state (or even national) level, the job of implementing these changes and administering elections falls on the roughly 8,000 local election officials (LEOs) across the country, a group that we have called the “stewards of democracy.”
Our last post featured an interview with Multnomah County, Oregon’s Election Director Tim Scott on some challenges and best practices for VBM systems.
Today, we take a deeper dive into what we’ve heard about mail voting from LEOs across the country, as part of the 2018 and 2019 Democracy Fund-Reed College LEO Surveys. After all, they’re the ones dealing with all of the absentee requests and mail ballots, and their professional, informed opinions should be integral to these policy discussions.
We’ve already seen some actions and public comments from counties and other local jurisdictions in response to this virus, and the increased demand for absentee ballots that many are facing. In March, the Election Board in Erie County, NY expanded the valid reasons for requesting an absentee ballot to include a public health emergency. County election officials in Arizona penned an editorial promoting an expansion of VBM for the 2020 election. LEOs in Florida’s three most populous counties, serving over a quarter of the state’s voters, will send every registered voter an absentee ballot in their upcoming elections.
Despite the political polarization at the national level (and in some state legislatures), state and local election officials have been remarkably bipartisan in their support for increased VBM capacity. Officials of both parties, serving in both red and blue states, have expressed their support for this effort. Republican Secretaries of State in Georgia and Ohio have endeavored to make absentee ballots more accessible to every registered voter; their Democrat counterparts in Connecticut and New Mexico have done the same. Bipartisan groups of LEOs in West Virginia and Arizona are encouraging more people to vote by mail. Five Western states now conduct every election by mail, and 21 additional states allow some elections to be run by mail. Many of these election officials see this as a nonpartisan issue, arguing instead that this is good policy in terms of public health and choices for voters.
Our surveys provide some pre-COVID context for these current events. 81% of LEOs agree that, since they started in their position, it has become easier for voters to choose to vote early or by mail, and 65% agree that it has become easier for officials to administer pre-election voting.
LEOs like that voters have choices. When asked to choose, over 60% were more likely to agree with the statement “voters should have lots of options such as voting at home or early in-person voting along with Election Day voting,” and only 30% agreed that “all voters should cast ballots on Election Day at a polling place or voting center.”
In addition, 30% of LEOs nationwide told us that they would support running all elections by mail, like is done in Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Only 2% of LEOs serve in these states, so the vast majority of support is in states that are not fully “vote at home.”
The comfort level with a full vote at home system is heavily moderated by jurisdiction size. Less than a quarter of LEOs serving less than 5,000 registered voters support this change, while over half of those with more than 250,000 registered voters support it.
We suspect this is a function of capacity and returns to scale. To take one (admittedly extreme) example, Bexar County, TX (San Antonio) had over 1 million registered voters on Election Day 2016 and about 720 polling places, roughly one location for every 1,500 voters. While Bexar is faced with an enormous flow of ballots, they have a dedicated Elections Administrator, several full-time elections staff, technical support, and potentially the budgetary resources to be able to “scale up” for a dramatic increase in mail voting in 2020.
In contrast, Hudspeth County (far West Texas) had 1,500 registered voters and 5 polling places on the same day, only 370 voters per location (data from the 2016 EAVS). Hudspeth County serves far fewer voters, but the election administrator in that county has to juggle elections duties along with the many other responsibilities of a county clerk. Regardless of the reasons, the gap between support in large and small jurisdictions is something that reformers will have to navigate.
We found no partisan patterns in preference for VBM. Support for running all elections by mail was similar among LEOs of both parties, at 34% (D) and 33% (R) – Independents were a notable holdout, with only 20% support.
We do, however, see significant geographic variation in support for VBM among LEOs (responses split by Census region).
This isn’t surprising, given that the five full-VBM states are all in the West. With other election reforms like online or automatic voter registration, we’ve seen that prior experience with a particular way of administering elections makes you much more comfortable with additional changes in that direction. Among states that have moved to full VBM systems, every LEO in Oregon and Washington who responded to our survey said they strongly support running all elections by mail – as did 95% of Colorado respondents.
There is a very distinct regional pattern to the use of VBM. In a region where over 60% of ballots are already VBM ballots, it’s not surprising that LEOs in that region would support fully vote at home. Most of them are already basically running a vote at home system with very limited precinct place voting. Why not go all in?
Among states without full VBM regimes, there was over 90% support among LEOs in North Dakota and California, two states that allow their counties to run any election by mail. These cases show us that when it comes to opinions about VBM, experience matters. LEOs who have run their elections fully by mail are overwhelmingly in support of the nation adopting this policy. Across the board, we see that states with a high proportion of voters participating by mail generally have more LEOs that support moving to full VBM.
This plot hints at one possible relationship between the level of voting by mail and LEO support. When a relatively low number of voters are choosing to vote by mail, there might be little impetus to promote or expand a jurisdiction’s VBM operation. The administrative lift is just too high.
As more voters choose this voting method, however, the per-voter economics of VBM improve and the economics of polling place operations worsen. For example, more ballots cast through the mail might lead to underutilized polling places on Election Day. It seems like the threshold to move to much higher levels of support is somewhere between 50% and 75% of ballots being cast by mail.
As one LEO told us:
Absentee or early voting accounts for nearly half of our ballots in general elections, resulting in a situation where we are, in essence, conducting two vastly different elections each as critical and time-consuming as the other. If we evolved to an all-mail system… we would be able to fully focus on just one election process, which would greatly assist us in running a more efficient, secure, and fair election.
From our surveys, we’ve seen that LEOs have a diverse range of opinions on this topic, and support outside of full-VBM states is relatively low. It will be interesting to see how support shifts if, as is expected in some quarters, the use of no-excuse absentee ballots skyrockets in November.
Jay Lee graduated with a Math/Statistics degree from Reed College in 2019, and currently serves as a Postbaccalaureate Research Fellow at the Early Voting Information Center. Follow Jay on Twitter at @jaylee_tx.
