STUDY: PANDEMIC CREATES GAP IN MAIL-IN VOTING VIEWS

Partisan divide has increased; both sides support greater access

Voters are more likely to be split on the issue of mail-in voting along party lines than ever before, in part due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report by a research team that included researchers from UC Riverside

According to the report, written by the UC Office of the Presidentfunded New Electorate Project, before the pandemic, there was no difference in the rates at which Democratic and Republican voters cast their ballots by mail or in-person.

However, based on nationally representative surveys conducted this spring and summer, researchers report a significantly greater preference for mail, or absentee, ballots among Democrats than Republicans. The researchers document for the first time a partisan gap in stated preferences in April 2020. By June, that gap had doubled — from a 10 percent difference in April to a 20 percent one in June.

The gap was even wider among those exposed to scientific projections about the COVID-19 pandemic, with Democrats expressing even greater preferences for mail ballots while Republicans were unaffected.

The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

After finalizing the paper, the research team — which includes researchers from UC San Diego, UC Riverside and USC — continued to survey America’s eligible voters. The partisan gap, they say, has continued to grow: By late August, more than half of Democrats but less than a quarter of Republicans said they personally preferred to vote by mail.

“A serious partisan divide has opened up on preferences for voting by mail and has grown from a gap to a gulf over the past several months,” said Thad Kousser, a UC San Diego professor of political science, senior author on the study and the New Electorate Project’s principal investigator.

Personal preferences aside, there is bipartisan support for making mail ballots available to all voters who want them.

“Despite the polarization, we see support across the board for making voting more accessible,” said Mackenzie Lockhart, lead author on the study and a political science doctoral candidate at UC San Diego. “In all our surveys, a majority of Republicans and Democrats supported not only making voteby-mail ballots available to anyone who wants them, but also sending ballots directly to every registered voter, regardless of how they intend to vote.”

Kousser noted that policies allowing any voters who request absentee ballots to cast their vote this way are in place in most states, including nearly every “swing state” in the presidential election.

“Republican and Democratic lawmakers have staked out very different positions on voting by mail and voters have begun to notice,” Lockhart said. “But on top of that, our evidence suggests that voters’ views on COVID-19 are probably also polarizing the issue. We found that scientific predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic had much smaller effects on Republicans than Democrats and contributed to a larger gap between partisans.”

Each survey was conducted with more than 5,600 Americans of voting age.