You know it’s a day that ends in “Y” when mail ballots are being attacked, whether by the president or one of his acolytes. No matter how thoroughly these tired lies and baseless accusations have been investigated, litigated and debunked, they keep returning.
But whether you call it vote by mail, absentee voting or vote at home, it’s not new, risky or partisan. In fact, mail ballots are one of the most time-tested, secure and bipartisan voting methods in America. And instead of being a threat to democracy, mail ballots might just be the solution to the problem of American democracy becoming a mere spectator sport, where an aging, shrinking number of voters determine most of our electoral outcomes.
Voting by mail began during the Civil War. In 1864, Union states faced a pressing question: Should soldiers on the battlefield be denied the right to vote for their leaders? The answer was no. Nineteen of the 25 Union states passed laws enabling absentee ballots. The principle was clear: No citizen should lose their vote simply because they were away from their polling place.
Since then, mail ballots have been a staple of American elections. For decades, both Republicans and Democrats recognized mailed-out ballots as essential to voter participation, and states increased access by removing the excuses required to vote at home, and allowing local jurisdictions to run all-mail-ballot elections for special and local contests.
Oregon pioneered the first federal all-mail election in 1996, then passed a ballot measure in 1998 guaranteeing that every active registered voter would be automatically delivered a ballot in every election. Other states followed, from west to east, with eight states and Washington, D.C., now using universal Vote at Home systems. All but 13 states now allow the use of mail ballots for any reason, and in the 2024 general election, 48 million voted by mail.
States have the right to determine the time, place and manner of how their elections are run, and have used a variety of options in expanding access to mail ballots. In Utah, they went county by county, starting in 2012 with legislative action and finishing in 2019 when the final county joined. A January 2024 poll by the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based conservative think tank, showed 76 percent of likely voters there thought the vote-by-mail process produces fair outcomes.
In Arizona and Montana, where you can sign up once to automatically receive your ballot every time, three-quarters of voters regularly vote at home. In Michigan, voters overwhelmingly approved no-excuse absentee voting in 2018 and permanent absentee in 2022. Mail ballots work because they give voters secure, flexible access — and voters like them.
But perhaps the most important impact is on turnout. States that mail every voter a ballot have consistently higher voter turnout — in 2020, academic studies showed those states saw an average increase of more than 5 percent. In 2020, when New Jersey delivered a ballot to every voter, they had the highest youth turnout in the country at 67 percent. But when they reverted to traditional polling place-based voting in 2024? Youth turnout plummeted to 42 percent.
What if the real impact of mail ballots on elections in this country was to make them more representative of its people, with greater participation across all ages and demographics? Even with the record high participation of 67 percent of eligible voters in 2020, our contests still attract far fewer voters than comparable elections in most other established democracies, from Australia and Latin America to Canada and Europe. In the 2024 presidential election, more than one-third of America’s eligible citizens — over 80 million — didn’t vote at all.
It’s far worse in primaries, which often determine who actually takes power in Congress and state governments. In the 2024 primary elections, turnout was just 18.5 percent of eligible citizens, less than one out of five. And the median age of these voters was 65. Add in the thousands of local contests for mayor, city council, school boards and more, where turnout is often in the single digits, and the picture is even bleaker.
So why the relentless attacks on mail ballots? The obvious answer is fear — fear of more Americans actually voting, rather than continuing to sit on the sidelines and let a relative minority of citizens determine who governs us.
Mail ballots are not a threat to democracy, but instead an invitation to it, in a time when voter fraud is vanishingly rare but voter disengagement is alarmingly real. When every voter has a ballot delivered, participation stops being an obstacle course and becomes a civic habit. If we want a stronger, more representative America, the path is clear: Put a ballot in each voter’s hands, and trust each voter to use it.
Barbara Smith Warner is executive director at National Vote at Home Institute.
