PPIC's top finding -- based on a working academic paper -- was that mailing every Californian voter a ballot led to a 12 percent increase in statewide turnout compared to 2016. Their paper noted that California did other things to encourage turnout, such as offering more choices on how and where to return ballots, adding the ability for voters to track their ballot's whereabouts and launching an extensive public education effort about the new voting regimen.
Another working paper, from a team at the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; and the University of Washington, noted that its Colorado research, conducted prior to 2020's presidential election, found turnout increases among several low-propensity voting cohorts:
- Young voters (16.6% increase in turnout),
- Blue-collar voters (10.0%),
- Voters without a high school diploma (9.6%),
- and all low-income voters (8.1%).
The turnout increase among Democrats and Republicans was 8 percent, but it was 12 percent among independents.
Inconsistent Data, Methods, FindingsBut there were differences in preliminary research over other absentee voting regimes and their more specific rulesbureaucratic details that are now being removed or revived by some state legislatures. In general, there are four absentee voting regimes, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission:
- Every voter receives a mailed-out ballot;
- Voters must first apply and satisfy an excuse to get a ballot;
- Voters must apply for a ballot but no excuse is required;
- Voters can sign up once to be on a permanent absentee list, which typically is for seniors and people with disabilities.
The fine print of these absentee voting regimes, many of which were suspended in 2020, is now being reinstated or toughened in Republican-majority legislatures. These reforms include stricter voter ID requirements and shorter filing timetables.
In most states, registered voters must apply to receive a mailed-out ballot. In 2020, 15 states mailed voters an application, as opposed to leaving that task to voters. Fourteen states suspended their requirement that voters had to satisfy a predetermined "excuse" that they could not vote on Election Day, such as age, infirmity or travel. Four states kept their excuse requirement.
Consider the excuse requirement that 14 states suspended. A Stanford University team found that suspending the excuse led to a 0.8 percent increase in turnout. But the PPIC report found that suspending the excuse led to a 2.7 percent drop in turnout nationwide.
This apparent conflict is an example of where different methodologies yield different results. PPIC's report offered no explanation for the turnout drop other than a footnote, which academics said was common in preliminary papers. In a follow-up phone call, Eric McGhee, a coauthor of the PPIC report, said that his team's research and Stanford's were different. As for the 2.7 percent drop, he said that states made many changes in the voting rules to help voters -- some of which voters embraced; others that they apparently did not.
"If some jurisdictions were anticipating a bad outcome [with accommodating voters] and they adopted a particular reform to get ahead of that, and the reform had no effect on it, that could make it appear it was causing a decline," he said. PPIC's methodology did not allow his team to delve into this more nuanced scenario, he said.
On another absentee balloting issue, PPIC reported that directly sending voters an application to receive a ballot by mail led to a 1.7 percent turnout increase, which it called "modest." That turnout increase might seem small to the public or "modest" to cautious scholars, but it was larger than Joe Biden's presidential victory margin in the states of Georgia (0.23 percent), Arizona (0.30 percent) and Wisconsin (0.63 percent).
Another area where there was disagreement concerned whether voters choose their method of voting based more on convenience -- what was more accessible -- or more based on coronavirus fears. In 2020, 29 states and the District of Columbia changed their laws to allow people to vote by mail or early due to public health concerns, as noted in an April article in the Journal of Democracy coauthored by Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford Law School professor, and Charles Stewart III, an MIT political scientist who oversees a research lab known for its parsing of U.S. Census data of voters. (In 2020, they created the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, a resource for election officials.)
The Nonprofit VOTE/U.S. Elections Project team said that 66 percent of voters chose what was "most convenient" when deciding when and where to vote, while 24 percent cited "concerns about coronavirus" as a major influence on their decision. It drew on a Pew Research Center survey of about 12,000 voters in November 2020 asking why those individuals chose to vote early or via a mailed-out ballot. On the other hand, the Persily-Stewart article cited post-election census data and found the opposite response.
"Postelection responses to the SPAE [Survey of the Performance of American Elections] describe the reasons behind the shift to mail balloting," they wrote. "Overall, 59 percent of respondents who stated that they were very worried about family members catching COVID reported having voted by mail, compared to 28 percent who said they had no COVID worries."
Blinders or Not?Academics have long played an important role in shaping election law and voting rules. Their facts and findings are a counterweight to partisan arguments. But insightful work is not always ready when lawmakers are reforming voting laws. Moreover, the push by some academics and the press to report findings that defy conventional wisdom can lead to premature, if not mistaken, reporting with high political stakes.
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