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LOS ANGELES – Despite frequently shouted concerns by both Democrats and Republicans, voting by mail doesn’t lend either political party an advantage on Election Day, though it might account for a slight uptick in overall voter participation, according to research led by UCLA professor of political science Daniel Thompson.<\/p>\n
Researchers tracked voting behavior from 1996 to 2018 in California, Utah and Washington state. These states have adopted universal vote-by-mail — the practice of mailing every registered voter a ballot with a return envelope – – and have rolled out the system on a staggered basis by county over several election cycles.<\/p>\n
Analysts compared voting data from those counties within each state that had switched to universal vote-by-mail with those that hadn’t and found no statistically significant increase in the amount of votes Democratic candidates gained over Republicans, or vice versa. They did track an average 2% increase in voter participation in counties that had adopted voting by mail.<\/p>\n
The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em> this summer, was Thompson’s last project as a Stanford doctoral candidate before he joined the UCLA faculty in July. Thompson’s co-authors were fellow Stanford graduate students Jennifer Wu and Jesse Yoder and Stanford professor of political science Andrew Hall.<\/p>\n “The big caveat is we were looking at normal times, not coronavirus times,” Thompson said. “It remains to be seen how much of an impact universal vote-by-mail has during the pandemic — we don’t know how well it will be conducted or who would fail to vote if they had to vote in person.”<\/p>\n Still, the study results imply that the partisan outcomes of vote-by- mail elections traditionally closely resemble in-person elections, both in voter turnout and electoral outcome.<\/p>\n Researchers initially considered comparing election results and turnout between states with and without universal vote-by-mail policies but found that certain systematic and partisan differences in vote-by-mail states could have skewed the results. Only six states in total have adopted the practice: the three studied and Colorado, Hawaii and Nevada.<\/p>\n “It’s very clear, even just looking at a map — Western states are places that have been much more open to the adoption of universal vote-by- mail,” Thompson said. “It’s not necessarily about obvious or presumed ‘left’ or `right’ places; it seems to be more about geography and maybe even culture around going to polling places on Election Day.”<\/p>\n The team tackled that challenge by analyzing voting results by county within each state and comparing election years when vote-by-mail was offered and when it was not. They focused on voting results for candidates for statewide offices, which were standard across counties.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LOS ANGELES – Despite frequently shouted concerns by both Democrats and Republicans, voting by mail doesn’t lend either political party an advantage on Election Day, though it might account for a slight uptick in overall voter participation, according to research led by UCLA professor of political science Daniel Thompson. Researchers tracked voting behavior from 1996 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":96901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1499,1496,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96900"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}