New Jersey mail-in ballot law boosts turnout

A 2019 state law requiring election officials to continue sending mail-in ballots to certain voters and the advent of early in-person voting have reshaped turnout dynamics in New Jersey’s low-interest, off-year elections.

More than one-third of New Jerseyans who cast ballots in the Nov. 7 election did so before polls opened on election day, a New Jersey Monitor analysis of county turnout data found, and turnout among early voters this year trended closer to figures seen in congressional and gubernatorial races than it did legislative contests.

“People who weren’t expected to be part of a given year’s electorate are suddenly finding it easier to participate. From a democracy standpoint, that’s a good thing: More people should vote,” said Ben Dworkin, director of Rowan University’s Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship.

Mail turnout in 2021 and 2022 accounted for roughly 22% of all votes cast. In 2019, the last election to see legislators lead their parties’ tickets, mail-in voters accounted for 16.7% of turnout. A decade ago, they accounted for just 6.4%.

About five years ago, state lawmakers enacted a law allowing voters to receive vote-by-mail ballots in perpetuity even if they request them just once.

Democratic and Republican operatives and other observers agree on the result: More voters are casting ballots in races they would typically have skipped, and they’re doing it by mail.

“The holy grail for political parties has always been ‘what can I do to get people to vote in this election and keep them on the voting rolls forever.’ It looks like that permanent vote-by-mail list is that holy grail,” said Dan Cassino, executive director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Poll.

Before the list, Republican voters were typically more likely to cast ballots in odd-year elections despite their smaller numbers, but mail-in voting has increasingly pushed Democrats to vote in elections they might otherwise ignore, Cassino said.

Though voters of both parties return mail-in ballots at roughly identical rates, Democratic mail-ballot requestors outnumbered their Republican counterparts more than 3-to-1 this year.

“The reality of our off-year elections is most people don’t know there’s an election. There’s a genuine voter education gap here,” said Henal Patel, law and policy director for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. “It’s actually why we should not have off-year elections, quite honestly. People know this. People know off-year elections have lower turnout.”

About 27% of New Jersey’s registered voters cast ballots in this year’s general election, compared with roughly 40% in 2021′s gubernatorial race and 71% in 2020′s presidential contest.

“This is about training voters. It’s about getting people comfortable with using (mail-in ballots), and every year, they get more comfortable doing it,” Dworkin said.

And there’s little indication that driving low-propensity voters to mail-in ballots has pushed New Jersey’s campaigns to more closely mirror their national counterparts or led voters to cast state ballots on national issues. If anything, it’s made campaigns engage them more: Because campaigns know certain voters will get a mail-in ballot, the campaigns can target them with campaign material.