I see this come up a lot in discussions about voting in America. Postal votes disproportionately go to Democrats, hence the Democrats want to expand postal voting while Republicans want to restrict it (and insist there is totally a bunch of fraud going on).
I’ve googled with a few search engines and haven’t found a convincing reason. Lots of evidence that the skew is real, but no explanation as to why. Indeed, if one just looks at demographics, one would expect postal voting to benefit Republicans by facilitating votes from people in the countryside who live far away from voting centers.
So what actually gives?
The more people that vote, the more people vote democrat. republicans are doing literally everything they can to disenfranchise voters, because it’s the only way they can win elections. I mean, they stole the last presidential election after failing to do it the previous time. I’m not so sure we’ll have an election in 2028, the pipeline of “sending untrained militia into the streets hoping to spark an incident that allows them an excuse to invoke martial law and cancel elections” is running very smoothly.
It doesn’t. Florida is an example.
People who vote dem are people with more interesting things to do than stand in line for hours.
Because democrat voters out number Republican voters. If you increase the votes you increase the democrat votes by nature of increasing the number of votes collected. This isn’t factoring secondaries like demographics.
Cities tend to be more democratic than their surrounding area, but also tend to be more densely populated. So you can have a situation like this with hours long lines in busy areas, which heavily disrupt people’s ability to have their vote registered.
So! The answer to that problem is mail-in voting! Vote in advance, with no lines, on your schedule! But the problem with city voting isn’t always an accident, and so mail-in voting has obviously got to go too.
But anyway, I think that’s your answer. It swings Democrat because other things have already happened to make voting in Democrat areas worse in other ways, and this seemed like a good alternative.
Yeah. It is important to note that mail-in voting is only like this in states executing various forms of voter suppression.
For western states that don’t have this tradition of voter suppression, the results tend to be more mixed. For instance, Colorado saw Republicans get a bump when switching to mail-in ballots as it was thought that mobility hindered elderly voters found it easier to vote from home than have to travel to vote.
When you can control where the polling locations are, you can drastically under serve areas that don’t vote republican. This discourages or even makes completely impossible voting in some areas. I live in a wealthy republican suburb. In the last 25 years there has never been much of a line to vote at any time of day. I can usually get in, vote, and be out in 15 minutes. Within a 20 minute drive of me, there are polling locations that have lines which take many hours to get through. Many people have to take time off of work, or leave their kids home alone to vote. Some people can’t stand in line for that long due to health issues.
While mail in voting enables traveling businessmen, college students, military, the elderly and sick to vote - which probably doesn’t overly favor either party - it does disrupt the polling location engineering which is intentionally designed to favor one party over the other.
Work.
Working people can’t take off time to vote. Poor people can’t take off time to vote. Students, teachers, can’t take off time to vote. So in-person voting favors retirees, wealthy people, and business owners like farmers who can set their own hours.
Access to voting is the foundation of democracy. Sane systems try to minimize any “pressure” to not vote, for any reason, because any such pressure is very likely to hit some demographics harder than others. The Republicans in particular rather blatantly rely on weaponizing this as a way of subverting democratic principles, by making it disproportionately hard to vote if you’re working, or poor, or young, or a minority of pretty much any kind.
Therefore, anything that increases access to voting, and levels the playing field, is worse for the GOP than being able to keep up the status quo of voter suppression. Hence their extremely shrill opposition to mail, and also the (“hilarious”) claims of “fraud” - painting the picture of your democracy being subverted is a handy talking point while you’re busy subverting your democracy.
So the boring answer is that your question is sort of back-to-front: it’s not that the mail ballots are skewed as such, it’s that access to in-person voting is. Mail ballots favor the Democrats because it is their voter base that’s (in this case, anyway) being suppressed.
Anything that increases access to polls helps Dems because people like their policies more than the cruelty at the heart of fascism
States with Republican control also have weird rules limiting number of polling places. Sometimes it’s like “1 polling location per county” where a rural county of 5,000 does just fine with 1 polling location. But then a city with millions of people also gets 1. The goal is to create lines around the block in cities, where people will simply give up rather than vote. Cities favor Democrats, so Republicans try to limit voter turnout in cities.
Voting by mail completely eliminates these artificial hurdles.
WTF? Is this true? That’s insane! My mid/east European village with 2,5k people (including children) has 4 polling locations so nobody can argue it’s too far for them. It’s also possible to register yourself beforehand and than you can vote wherever you want (either inside the country or at embassy abroad).
America is a hovel where there are few rights for workers. They literally can’t afford to take time off work to vote, and Republicans make it as hard as possible for them to vote in person, by removing transport options, and closing polls at ridiculously early times. Most Republican controlled states close polls at 7pm.
Until very recently, Republicans had an edge in mail-in voting, however after Trump started deriding it, a not small number of Republican voters stopped using it.
Also skewing the numbers is that Democratic-led states largely allow everyone to vote by mail if they’d like, whereas Republican-led states strictly limit mail-in voting to people who meet certain criteria. This means that Democrats are overrepresented when you look at a national count. Oregon and Washington don’t even have in-person voting, only vote by mail. Republican-led states limiting mail-in voting predates Trump though, because they try to limit anything they can related to voting.
Good point. This was part of Trump’s plan in 2020. He told his followers to vote in person, then declared victory on election night before any mail ballots could be realistically counted. Playing into the idea that it was “stolen” because “he was ahead on election night.” Which only happened because he specifically told all his followers NOT to vote by mail.
Afaik mail-in ballots were not the deciding factor in the 2020 election, which Trump lost handily. He was never ahead on election night, though that wouldn’t stop him from claiming it
He was briefly “ahead” in very early vote totals, when in person voting was mostly counted and mail in ballots were mostly uncounted. I remember it was not yet midnight pacific time on election night.
It was kinda a key thing in the 2020 election. The whole “stop the count” thing. They wanted to stop counting while Trump was still technically ahead in vote totals.
Yeah, Trump is just a blowhard who can’t accept losing. (He’s also a liar, but I’m not sure he doesn’t genuinely believe the election was rigged).
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In addition to the reasons given by others, it’s because Republicans are eugenicists who think people should have been and should continue to be left to die if they get sick. Mail-in voting was expanded during covid to make it more accessible, and they (in media) seized on the opportunity to drive a wedge between people and create doubt in the democratic system. If your goal is authoritarianism, any small step to reduce faith in electoral systems is a win because it gives you an excuse to take control outside of elections.
I’ve wondered this too. My only guess is if you mess with US Mail there are strict federal laws that protect it. Plus it gives time to read, research and discuss what you’re voting for. LOL, oh and my wife tells me who to vote for.
Can’t speak for the ballot boxes but there always seems to be some stories about missing ballots. Or people waiting out side for hours in November.
