Assessing the political impact of a potential ban on late-arriving ballots is a tricky endeavor. More Democrats than Republicans currently vote by mail, but Republicans — especially in rural areas or serving overseas in the military — could still face challenges if the court struck down late-arriving ballots.
During the 2024 election in Nevada, two deeply red counties registered the highest rates of mail voting, according to state election data. In Douglas County, 63 percent of voters cast their ballots by mail; in Nye County, the number was 58 percent. Both counties voted in favor of Donald J. Trump by more than 30 percentage points.
Not all states track party registration. In those that do, late-arriving ballots tended to skew Democratic in the 2024 election. In Virginia, for example, 73 percent of ballots accepted after Election Day were cast for Vice President Kamala Harris, compared with just 23 percent for Mr. Trump. However, mail ballots that arrived before Election Day had almost the same partisan breakdown.
In New Jersey, the data is slightly different but paints a similar picture. Registered Democrats sent 48 percent of ballots that arrived after Election Day, compared with just 18 percent from registered Republicans and 34 percent from independent or unaffiliated voters.
The Democratic preference for mail voting is a relatively new phenomenon. For years, voting by mail was the provenance of Republicans, who saw it as an efficient and safe way to ease voting for a key slice of the party’s base: rural and older voters.
During the contested 2000 presidential election in Florida, mail ballots from oversees military members helped push George W. Bush over the top. And when Republicans won full control of Georgia government in 2005, one of the first laws they passed instituted “no-excuse” absentee voting, meaning all voters, not just certain classes like the disabled or older voters, were eligible to use the practice.
Overall, national partisan divides over mail voting were mostly marginal — until 2020.
That year’s election, during the pandemic, completely flipped the political dynamics. Democrats embraced the method as a safe form of voting, while Republicans, largely because of disparagement from Mr. Trump, abandoned the method in favor of voting in person.
By the end of the 2020 election, 58 percent of Democrats had voted by mail, compared with 29 percent of Republicans, according to data from the Elections Performance Index at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Over the next four years, some Republicans endeavored to close the gap. Turning Point Action, the political group founded by Charlie Kirk, embarked on a multimillion-dollar effort to push early voting, including by mail, ahead of the 2024 election. In Pennsylvania, an effort spearheaded by the campaign of Dave McCormick strongly encouraged voters in the critical battleground state to embrace mail voting. Mr. McCormick ended up narrowly defeating Senator Bob Casey, the incumbent.
The share of mail voters in Pennsylvania who were registered Republicans jumped to 33 percent in 2024 from 24 percent in 2020, according to data from the Election Lab at the University of Florida, while Democrats dropped to 56 percent of the mail-voting electorate in 2024 after registering 65 percent in 2020.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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