More than 19 million voters have returned mail ballots for next week’s midterm elections, even as President Donald Trump continues to disparage mail voting and its use recedes from pandemic-era highs.
In all, more than 60 million mail ballots have been sent to voters or requested as of Wednesday, according to the University of Florida Election Lab.
Trump has spent a decade attacking mail voting and this year sought to restrict it. But the practice remains deeply embedded in American elections, even as Democrats in some states appear to be shifting from mail voting toward early in-person voting.
Mail voting steadily gained popularity for two decades before hitting historic highs in 2020, when voters — particularly Democrats — turned to voting from home during the coronavirus pandemic.
In a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll, 27 percent of likely voters who said they were certain or likely to vote, or already had voted, said they expected to cast a ballot by mail. Forty-one percent said they planned to vote the old-fashioned way: in person on Election Day. In the poll, 24 percent said they would vote early in person, and 8 percent said they would use a drop box or government office.
Mail voting surged during the pandemic, particularly among Democrats. Its use has since fallen across party groups, though Democrats remained somewhat more likely than Republicans to vote by mail in 2024.
Five states provide a glimpse of mail voting in 2026
It is too early to get a full picture of mail voting nationally. But comparable data from five states — Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — offer an early, limited snapshot.
Requests for mail ballots in those states were down as of early this month, according to an analysis by Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who studies elections administration.
Those five states can be more fully analyzed than others because they provide data showing how voting patterns compare with the same stage of the election cycle in 2022.
In data collected four weeks before Election Day, requests were down most sharply in Georgia — by 50 percent compared with the same point in 2022. They were down the least in Pennsylvania, by 7 percent.
The available party registration data points to a narrowing gap. In Pennsylvania, mail ballot requests from registered Democrats were down 14 percent, while requests from registered Republicans were up 19 percent. In North Carolina, requests fell for both groups but declined more among Democrats — 42 percent, compared with 19 percent for Republicans.
Those figures are preliminary, Stewart said. They measure requests, not completed votes, and could change substantially before Election Day.
Separately, the nonpartisan ballot-tracking group VoteHub found evidence in Nevada that 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.
“In-person early voting has been very blue, while mail ballot returns have been more lackluster for Democrats than expected,” said Zachary Donnini, head of data science for VoteHub.
Trump’s attempts to limit mail voting failed
Trump this year signed an executive order that sought to prevent mail ballots from going to anyone who wasn’t on government lists of voters. The Supreme Court last month blocked Trump’s plans in response to litigation from voting rights groups and states led by Democrats.
The ruling set aside a U.S. Postal Service rule that would have required states to change their mail ballot envelopes and provide lists of voters who qualified for mail ballots. The post office plans would have prevented ballots from going to eligible voters if they were included in mail batches with ballots meant for voters who didn’t appear on the lists, according to a whistleblower’s report to Congress.
While the justices halted Trump’s mail ballot plans, election officials have raised concerns about how postal delivery times could affect the midterms.
Election officials in Wisconsin raised alarms after 269 mail ballots in Milwaukee were delivered too late to be counted in an April election for a seat on the state Supreme Court. In the August primaries in Washington state, 19 counties rejected two to four times as many mail ballots as they had four years ago because they were delivered too late.
Election officials in those states and others are telling voters to return their mail ballots as early as possible, with many recommending that they return them in person or in drop boxes if their states have them, now that the election is less than a week away.
Trump’s disparagement of mail-in voting may actually wind up helping Democrats, who historically have been more likely than Republicans to vote this way, said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who is an authority on early voting. Mail-in ballots are far more likely to be rejected than in-person ballots, with more than a half-million discarded in 2024, most commonly because the signature on the ballot did not match the signature on file.
“Trump may have converted what would have been thousands of rejected Democratic mail ballots into in-person votes,” McDonald wrote in a Substack post.
Mail voting varies by state — and some have tweaked their rules
D.C. and eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington — conduct elections entirely by mail, automatically sending ballots to voters. Twenty-nine other states allow any voter to request mail ballots without giving a reason. In the remaining 13 states, voters must qualify with a reason, such as illness or being away from home.
States have moved in different directions since the last midterm elections. Six enacted laws that stop the counting of mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward, though a Kansas court blocked that state’s law from taking effect.
In North Carolina, Democrats and voting rights groups have raised concerns about new rules resulting in the rejection of mail ballots for minor mistakes, such as voters signing in the wrong spot or failing to seal an inner envelope.
Other states have expanded mail voting options. Michigan voters in 2022 approved a ballot measure allowing voters to sign up to automatically receive a ballot in the mail for every election. Since then, requests for mail ballots have increased.
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
The post Millions still vote by mail. How they do is changing. appeared first on Washington Post.
