This article in the Washington Monthly reports on an experiment in vote by mail in Utah which outlines exactly what every state should be doing in advance of November. In fact, they should do it in advance of any upcoming primaries if they have the time:
While Suncrest feels like one community—it has one Mormon church and one restaurant—it’s divided into two counties: Salt Lake and Utah. In fact, the county line runs right down the middle of it. Both sides are similar in population size; each is 90 percent white. In the 2016 election, however, they had dramatically different voter turnout rates. Suncrest’s Salt Lake County residents showed up to vote at a rate nearly 18 percentage points higher than their Utah County counterparts, with about 81 percent of Salt Lake’s registered voters casting ballots compared to Utah’s 63 percent.
What made the difference? The two counties used different voting systems. Whereas Utah County stuck with the traditional model of people lining up at polling places to cast ballots, Salt Lake County switched to conducting its election entirely by mail. Under that system, otherwise known as “vote at home,” voters receive their ballots in the mail weeks before Election Day and can either mail them back or drop them off at a secure site. In other words, Suncrest, a demographically homogenous community, offered something no other part of the country has: a natural experiment to compare traditional voting to voting at home.
Usually, an electoral reform is deemed successful if it increases voter participation a few percentage points. The jump in Salt Lake County’s turnout was on a whole other level. And the disparity wasn’t limited to Suncrest. In that same election, 21 of Utah’s 29 counties had switched to vote at home. Those counties had an average turnout rate of nearly 9 percentage points higher than those that voted the old-fashioned way—and 5 percent higher than was predicted by a generally accurate turnout forecast, according to a study by Pantheon Analytics that was commissioned by the Washington Monthly.Usually, an electoral reform is deemed successful if it increases voter participation by a few percentage points. In its first vote-at-home election, turnout in Salt Lake County surged by 18 percentage points.
The success of those counties led six of the remaining eight holdouts to try vote at home in the 2018 midterm election, including Utah County. Sure enough, Suncrest’s Utah side turned out 8 percentage points higher than it did two years earlier. Such an increase was especially unusual, given that midterms generally see lower turnout compared to presidential election years. Now, in 2020, Utah will run its first statewide election entirely by mail.
That has lessons for the rest of the country. For the past few presidential elections, national turnout has hovered around 55 percent of eligible voters; for the past few midterm elections, it has fluctuated from the mid-30s to the 50s. Before counties started mailing out ballots, Utah’s voter participation hadn’t been much better. But it addressed the issue, taking a cue from other states that were experimenting with vote at home to boost turnout.
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If getting more people to vote isn’t enough, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus has made vote at home more essential than ever. The threat of the community-spread infection, which thus far has no vaccination or cure, could be more pronounced at polling places, where thousands of voters will stand close together in lines and put their hands on doorknobs, pens, and touch screens. Vote at home accomplishes two things at once: It takes away the threat of the virus spreading at polling places, and it mitigates the possibility that voters will not show up to vote out of fear of getting infected. For those who want to prevent a public health crisis from crippling a presidential election, the solution is already out there. It just also happens to have even broader lessons beyond how to vote during a pandemic.
That’s why Utah is so important: It shows the most politically palatable route to reform. Think of it like a business strategy. You start by giving customers a taste of a good product. Then, if all goes according to plan, they want more of it. In essence, Utah did precisely that by having its counties experiment with vote at home. They got voters hooked, simply by letting them try it out.
Read the whole thing. This primary has shown that same-day voting can be very different than early voting so that’s a wrinkle. I think we’ll need to think about that when it comes to primary elections. In fact, we need to think about a lot of things when it comes to primary elections.
I have been voting by mail for years now and its the best. If I lose the ballot for some reason I can go in and vote with a provisional ballot. It’s very, very easy as it should be for everyone.