Dems plan to vote by mail, GOP in person
Marquette poll finds another partisan divide
The signs in battleground Wisconsin increasingly point to a new and volatile election scenario: a big Democratic-leaning bloc of voters casting absentee ballots — and a big Republican-leaning bloc voting at the polls on Election Day.
Consider this finding from a statewide survey released Tuesday by the Marquette Law School:
Among people planning to vote absentee by mail, Joe Biden leads the race for president by 67 points.
Among people planning to vote in person on Election Day, Donald Trump leads by 41 points.
While exceptionally stark, those numbers echo the evidence of other polls and Wisconsin’s recent elections in the 2020 pandemic: that one party’s voters (Democrats) are embracing voting by mail far more than the other party’s (Republicans).
Such a big partisan divide over voting method raises some stark possibilities in a state widely viewed as a possible tipping point in the race for president.
One is that voting issues or problems emerge that disproportionately affect one method of voting, and therefore the choice of how to vote has an impact on the vote itself.
Another is that the election tally could shift substantially — and become more favorable to Democrats — over the course of the election night or the days that follow, if the counting drags on (because mail ballots take longer to count). Some analysts have dubbed this the “blue shift.”
Another is more post-election legal fights over the vote.
And another is that Democrats and Republicans end up with very different views of the legitimacy of the outcome.
“It’s unfortunate so much of this election is going to be focused on how we vote rather than the issues in the campaign and the choice between candidates,” said political scientist Charles Stewart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There are risks for both sides if one party embraces mail voting and the other doesn’t, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If there is a surge of coronavirus cases near the election, those who had planned to vote in person may find it difficult to cast a ballot — and may not have enough time to request a ballot by mail, he said. Clerks short of poll workers might have to close polling locations, meaning some voters would have to go to new precincts and wait in longer lines.
At the same time, those voting by mail face risks that their vote won’t be counted, Burden said. If a voter makes a mistake at the polls, the error is discovered right away, and poll workers can help rectify the situation. Those who have problems with absentee ballots won’t know about the issue until later, if at all.
And there are many opportunities for errors. The envelopes absentee ballots are returned in must include the voter’s signature, a witness’ signature and the address of the witness. If they don’t, they aren’t counted.
Postal problems can also prevent ballots from being counted.
“A voter who sends a ballot in by mail is taking some risk that the ballot won’t arrive on time to be counted,” Burden said.
Some ballots never got delivered in the April race for state Supreme Court, and the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks has been in turmoil.
“It only takes one postal worker to not deliver a bin of ballots or to return it to the clerk’s office for whatever reason or to leave it in a truck or something,” Burden said. “And then you’ve got dozens or hundreds of voters who don’t have their ballots.”
Then there’s the impact on the how the election count is reported in the hours and maybe days after the polls close.
‘The blue shift’ in vote counting
MIT’s Stewart and Ohio State law professor Edward Foley have written about a relatively recent phenomenon called the “blue shift.” That’s when the reported vote tally shifts toward Democrats over time because votes that are reported later tend to be more Democratic.
Possible reasons before the pandemic included later reporting by blue-leaning cities and higher use of provisional ballots by Democratic voters (provisional ballots, which are counted only if a voter can prove later that they were eligible to vote, are not widely used in Wisconsin.)
But in the 2020 pandemic, with an explosion of voting by mail and Democrats more likely to vote that way, the “blue shift” could be much more dramatic as mail ballots take longer to count in some states.
“The slower the count, the more that’s going to be pronounced,” Stewart said.
A small example of the “blue shift” occurred in the 2018 election for governor in Wisconsin, when the election night reporting shifted late toward Democrat Tony Evers and against GOP incumbent Scott Walker after Milwaukee
reported its absentee ballot vote. That occurred at a time when the media was reporting 100% of the county’s precincts were tallied, leading some to think the entire Milwaukee vote was already in.
Republicans, realizing what happened, didn’t challenge the count. But if in 2020 news outlets leave viewers with the impression that all the votes are in when many mail and absentee ballots haven’t been counted, that could fuel doubts and disputes over the outcome.
“It just looks suspicious and if there’s already hostility between the parties and a lack of trust in authorities and in systems, then it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that somebody is messing with the system (in a way) that is unfair, that it’s being rigged,” Burden said.
Chances high for problems at the polls
The potential for problems at the polls this election is high, Burden said. Those who want to vote by mail should request their ballots at least two weeks before Election Day to ensure they have time to receive and return them, he said. But many likely won’t request them that early.
“There are just too many different things that could happen that it seems unlikely that all of it will go smoothly,” Burden said.
Both parties in Wisconsin are promoting absentee voting by mail among their voters, though some Republicans have expressed fear that Trump’s attacks on mail voting will depress the party’s absentee vote.
“It’s such a bad idea to scare our own voters away from a legit way to cast their ballot,” Rohn Bishop, the GOP chair for Fond du Lac County, said on Twitter last month.
State GOP chair Andrew Hitt said he didn’t share that concern, saying, “the president has not said anything (negative) about Wisconsin” and its system of absentee mail voting.
State Democratic chair Ben Wikler said Trump’s rhetoric about mail voting complicates the GOP’s effort to get voters to vote absentee.
“They’re running into a Trumpshaped buzz saw because the president keeps attacking ballots cast by mail,” Wikler said. “It puts them in a very difficult position to have a president who’s deriding the very thing that many of their voters will count on to avoid risking having to go into an indoor space in the pandemic.”
Polls show wide party gaps over voting method
Polls are an even more striking illustration of the party gap over voting method.
In a Wisconsin survey by the Elections Research Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Democrats prefer voting by mail (67%) to voting in person (33%), while Republicans overwhelmingly prefer voting in person (79%) to voting by mail (21%).
In a Wisconsin poll by CBS, 62% of Democrats said they preferred to vote by mail or absentee ballot in November, compared to 25% of Republicans.
And in the Marquette poll, Biden led 81% to 14% among those who plan to vote by mail and 50% to 45% among those who plan to vote early in person. But Trump led 67% to 26% among those who plan to vote at the polls on Election Day.
Burden said one reason for this pattern is that Democrats have higher concerns about getting coronavirus (and are more likely to live in densely populated communities where the risks have been higher).
And some Republicans may be telling pollsters they plan to vote in-person to show their support for Trump, who has expressed skepticism about mail voting, Burden said.
Stewart said he expected the massive partisan divide in the polling over how to vote to narrow when it comes to how Democrats and Republicans actually vote in the end.
But he still expects there to be a gap, with all the potential for partisan clashes over the election that come with it.
“The bottom line (potential) here is for an intense period of partisan rancor over the vote counting and likely an intense period of legal skirmishing and warfare in the days and weeks following the vote,” he said.
“It’s unfortunate so much of this election is going to be focused on how we vote rather than the issues in the campaign and the choice between candidates.”
Charles Stewart political scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology