Data from this fall’s early balloting and interviews with officials and voters suggest Americans, particularly Democrats, are moving away from mailing ballots and toward in-person voting and drop boxes, following President Donald Trump’s relentless attack on vote-by-mail.
Requests for mail ballots are down compared to the last midterm election in six of eight states analyzed by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who is the leading authority on early voting data. In Georgia, he found, requests for mail ballots are down 40 percent, while in-person early voting is “through the roof.”
In Wisconsin, mail voting is down compared to four years ago, but early in-person voting swelled on Tuesday, the first day it was offered. More than 55,000 people cast early ballots in person, a 65 percent increase compared to four years ago, state data show.
And in Nevada, Democrats are shifting away from mail voting faster than Republicans. Eighteen percent of Democrats who have voted early in person this month used the mail in 2024; among Republicans, it was 10 percent, according to data analyzed by Zachary Donnini, head of data science at VoteHub, a nonpartisan political data media company.
“If you’re an MS NOW watcher, a CNN watcher, a high political engagement voter who consumes a lot of news, you saw so much about Trump trying to gut the USPS,” Donnini said. “They are saying, ‘I don’t trust the USPS to handle my ballot. I’m going to hand it over myself.’”
Nationally, more than 15 million people have already voted, including more than 5.6 million at in-person locations and about 9.7 million by mail, which includes drop boxes, according to McDonald’s tallies.
For a time, it was uncertain whether mail voting would proceed as normal. In March, the president signed an executive order that sought to limit mail ballots to those on government lists of citizens, a process he asserted was necessary to prevent noncitizens from voting.
In response, the U.S. Postal Service wrote rules that would have required states to provide lists of voters who qualified for mail voting. Under the plan, the post office was prepared to hold back thousands of eligible ballots if a single one in the same batch was not on the list, according to a whistleblower’s report to Congress.
That plan was blocked last month by the Supreme Court, but the drama and litigation played out over months in the news.
Vote-by-mail has been falling since it peaked in 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic, and experts said it was possible that declines this year are part of that trend. But interviews with voters, Democratic lawmakers and data analysts suggest that Trump’s onslaught and weeks of news questioning whether the Postal Service would meddle with ballots is having an impact on voters, especially Democrats.
Democratic leaders and others have worked to assure voters that mail-in votes are secure, and experts say the system appears to be working normally. But the controversy has lingered in the minds of many voters, said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Unfortunately some of the harm from that effort has remained in the sense of voters still being unsure about mail voting, still being unsure whether they can rely on that system that will be able to cast a ballot that will arrive on time and be counted,” she said.
Democrats suspected that Trump’s goal in fixating on mail-in voting was to suppress turnout. If so, there’s no evidence that it worked. In fact, early voting is surging across the country. The ACLU, for its part, is trying to both reassure people that mail voting is safe and make sure they know alternatives are available.
Getting a full picture of voting patterns won’t be available until well after the election, when all votes have been cast and states have released more detailed information, said Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who analyzes early voting trends. But the trend can be glimpsed in some states as data trickles out.
In North Carolina, early voters are shifting from the mail to in-person locations, Stewart found. He found that among Democrats who have already voted, just over half who voted by mail in 2022 switched to early in-person voting this year. Republicans also shifted, but more of them — 61 percent — stuck with the mail.
Almost nobody who voted in person in 2022 switched to mail ballots this time, he found.
Stewart said that he sees the same trend in other states — a spike in early in-person voting, driven by Democrats.
“This is consistent with large numbers of Democrats who had previously voted by mail abandoning the mode,” he said. “It’s also somewhat true among Republicans, just to a lesser extent.”
Donnini of VoteHub also sees evidence in Florida and in large counties in Ohio and North Carolina that the early in-person vote is heavily Democratic compared with mail-in votes this year — more so than in the past.
McDonald, of the University of Florida, noted that while mail ballot requests are down, voters in five of the eight states he examined have returned them at higher rates. That could reflect enthusiasm in the election or concerns about delays in delivery.
“Voters are concerned about mail-in voting,” said Ohio state Rep. Karen Brownlee (D). “There is an opportunity to drop off your ballot into a secure drop box. Many Democratic voters are choosing to do that.”
Susan Shauger, 83, said in an interview that she worried about how ballots will be treated after Trump tried to change mail voting policies. She recently deposited her mail ballot in a drop box.
“Who knows what can happen to it and what shenanigans could be played,” said Shauger, a lawyer in Massachusetts who voted for Democrats.
Many Democratic officials are encouraging voters to put their absentee ballot into drop boxes, which bypasses the mail, or to vote in person at an early vote location. If using the mail, they suggest sending the ballot back as early as possible.
That was the message this week from the Michigan secretary of state’s office. “Voters should avoid putting their ballot in the mail,” a top official said in a news release, offering an array of alternatives instead.
Seattle resident Vivian McKechnie, 35, likes Washington state’s system of automatically mailing ballots to every registered voter. She’s typically returned her ballot by mail in the past but plans to use a drop box this year because of Trump’s recent attempts to change mail voting rules, she said.
“If I dropped it in the mail today, I’d probably be fine,” said McKechnie, a financial adviser who plans to vote for Democrats. “But just to be safe, I’m putting it in a drop box.”
The post After Trump said he didn’t trust mail ballots, Democrats turned to voting in person appeared first on Washington Post.
