Presidential Commission on Election Administration: Absentee and Early Voting: Weighing the Costs of Convenience

Introduction

The rules governing early and absentee (“convenience”) voting options in the U.S. have generally liberalized over time, contributing to rising usage in recent years. Most of these rules are set in state, not federal, law, so there is impressive diversity across the country. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) endorsed the expansion of pre-Election Day voting, but also warned against a reduction in resources devoted to traditional, Election Day voting. For ballots cast before Election Day, we identify several reasons to prefer early voting to absentee voting.

By early voting we mean in-person voting in advance of Election Day, at existing government offices or designated voting centers. It differs in timing, but not form, from traditional, secret-ballot, Election Day voting. About half the states offer early voting.

By absentee voting we mean any system in which a voter may, in advance of Election Day, request a ballot, to be completed in the place of the voter's choosing. Every state has some form of absentee voting. In 20 states the absentee-ballot request must be accompanied by an excuse, such as being unable to get to the polls due to disability, confinement, or religious obligation. Seven states and D.C. also permit voters to join a permanent absentee list, negating the need for later requests. Other states offer permanent absentee status selectively, to those with disability or illness. Requests for absentee ballots may be submitted in a variety of ways, but absentee ballots are usually returned by mail or in person.¹

Finally, vote-by-mail is used in three states. These states mail ballots to all eligible voters, then collect completed ballots at drop-off centers or by mail. In logistical terms, vote-by-mail is essentially absentee voting with automatic permanent absentee status for all eligible voters.

Some Pros and Cons of Convenience Voting

The main benefit of convenience voting is clear: states with absentee or early-voting options give their potential voters more choices and thus facilitate participation in elections. Even traditional polling-place voters can gain from this system if establishing convenience-voting options results in shorter Election Day lines. But permitting voters to cast ballots in advance of Election Day also creates new challenges and exacerbates some potential problems. For instance, correcting errors in ballots or revising them to reflect late-breaking events such as withdrawal or replacement of a candidate is made more difficult for officials when voting starts early. A longer voting period probably also increases instances of the difficult problem of some voters seeming to submit multiple ballots. Many states employ provisional ballots when someone believed to have submitted an early or absentee ballot appears on Election Day, but it can often prove difficult to separate intentional voting crimes from voter confusion or administrative mistakes.

Scholars generally agree that early voting is more secure than absentee voting.² Early and Election Day voters typically submit their choices directly to a voting machine. In contrast, absentee voting separates the voter from her ballot before it is counted. Typically a poll worker or election official is responsible for opening absentee ballots and depositing them in the voting machine. Hence, it is difficult to ensure the privacy of the vote choices. Ballots are sometimes unreadable because they have been bent or incorrectly completed, leaving the voter's intent unclear. For an in-person voter these problems are easily remedied; a poll worker may provide a replacement ballot or offer assistance in completing the ballot. When voters “overvote” by choosing too many options for a given contest, many jurisdictions use machines that automatically alert the in-person voter to this problem. Without the voter present, none of these corrections can take place. In this regard, while “drop boxes” are a welcome feature in vote-by-mail states, because they reduce the likelihood of ballots being lost, they do not permit real-time corrections.³ Officials in some states contact voters if a ballot envelope is missing a valid signature, but there is not always sufficient time for correction before the submission deadline.

States differ in their deadlines for absentee ballot submission. In the 2012 election, 33 states required the absentee ballot to arrive by Election Day, four states required ballots to arrive before Election Day, and 13 states plus the District of Columbia required ballots to have been postmarked by Election Day.⁴ States also vary considerably in the details of how absentee ballots are cast and voter identification is established. Such variation increases voter confusion, but national standardization of the process is an unrealistic recommendation given the federal nature of U.S. election law.

The complicated pipeline creates more opportunities for ballots to “leak” from the system. By Stewart's count, mail ballots are lost at about twice the rate of those cast in person.⁵ He also estimates in one election that 21% of all ballot requests were lost somewhere along the way. A study of California elections shows that in-person ballots were more likely to be counted and that reductions in the “residual vote” due to improving voting technology have been entirely offset by losses precipitated by the rise in absentee voting.⁶ In addition, the degree which ballots are counted might be uneven across groups in the electorate. For example, one study finds that absentee ballots submitted by language-minority voters and those on the “permanent absentee” list were less likely to be counted.⁷

Handling of absentee ballots by third-party actors, as permitted in some states, raises additional concerns about chain of custody and fidelity to a voter's wishes. The Baker-Carter Commission on Federal Election Reform recommended that states prohibit a third party (other than an approved family member) from handling absentee ballots. Involvement by an additional person, even a well-meaning one, creates more opportunities for a mishandled ballot. The “permanent absentee” system presents a unique concern in a lower turnout election when many ballots are sent automatically but relatively few are returned, leaving a large number of floating ballots, a situation ripe for abuse.⁸

Even if lost votes were not a concern, absentee ballots often lengthen the process of counting and certifying the vote. For example, late-arriving ballots in the 2012 election in San Diego County took several weeks to count and certify. This delay is explained by the county registrar having to “confirm each voter's registration status, compare each voter's signature on the envelope with the signature on the registration form to verify that the voter was who he or she said, and verify that the voter did not cast a ballot elsewhere.”⁹ In a close election, the processing of absentee (and provisional) ballots becomes a prime target for litigation from the candidates, political parties, and other advocacy groups. On the other hand, some states permit counting of absentee ballots as they arrive rather than waiting until Election Day or later to tabulate them.¹⁰ The desire to get a jump on the counting is understandable, but early tabulation also places new demands on administrators to prevent information about early counts leaking to the public and affecting how subsequent voters act.

Early voting avoids some of these risks, but it also generally delivers somewhat less convenience. Establishing many early-vote centers can be costly, and their location can become a politically contentious matter or can facilitate voting for some subgroups of the electorate more than others.¹¹

Voter Confidence and Convenience Voting Regimes

One way to study the effects of convenience voting is to sort states into “regimes” according to how their ballots are cast. Figure 1 shows what percentages of all ballots were cast absentee (including vote-by-mail) and early by domestic civilians for 47 states and the District of Columbia in the 2012 general election. The tremendous diversity across states is readily apparent. To simplify, we identify seven rough groupings, which are reflected by different markers in the figure.¹²

• (1) The two all-mail states of Oregon and Washington stand apart.¹³

• (2) Five states had high rates of absentee voting of 40% to 80%, but less than 10% of ballots cast early.

• (3) Florida is the anomalous case with moderately high (about 30%) rates of both early and absentee voting.

• (4) Eleven states had about 20% to 40% absentee voting and little early voting (close to zero for all except Hawaii and Ohio, where around 10% voted early).

• (5) Six states saw low absentee usage but high rates of early voting, of about 40%–60%.

• (6) Eight states and the District of Columbia saw about 15% to 25% of ballots cast early and less absentee voting (0% to 12%).

• (7) The remaining fourteen states had low usage (<12%) of both convenience options.

It is not yet clear how these regimes differ in terms of various costs and benefits. For example, preliminary evidence has not provided a firm demonstration of cost savings, although more study of this question is needed.¹⁴ Concerning voter participation, some studies find modest positive effects of absentee voting availability on turnout, but others find no relationship or even negative effects.¹⁵ Other natural queries are whether there are large differences across these states in the “residual vote,” and how much the residual vote rate reflects under-voting, spoiled ballots, or lost ballots. We recommend more research on these important questions.

It is also possible to examine how the usage of absentee and early voting relates to voters' confidence in the integrity of the state electoral system. Respondents to the 2012 Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE) were asked if they were confident that their votes were counted as intended. Although confidence has been shown to be influenced by a range of factors, including ratings of poll worker performance and who won the election, it is also shaped by the mode of voting, in sensible ways.¹⁶Table 1 shows that those who cast absentee ballots were less confident than those who voted early or on Election Day.

It is logically possible that this pattern originates in people who are naturally suspicious also tending to prefer absentee voting. However, it is much more likely that causality runs the other way, and a cost of the convenience of voting absentee is less certainty that one's vote will ultimately count. When we examine confidence levels across the seven regime types identified above, the pattern is fairly robust across states, as demonstrated in Table 2. Although the data are limited, higher confidence among early voters and lower confidence among absentee voters are common (though not universal) within regimes. So the comparatively low confidence of absentee voters is not purely a result of more anxious voters happening to reside in states which favor absentee voting. Indeed, lower confidence among absentee voters has been shown to hold even after accounting for other factors such as education, age, race, and sex.¹⁷

A parallel question is whether concerns about fraud are associated with how the state's ballots are cast. Public perceptions of election fraud are caused by many factors, including partisanship.¹⁸ But opinions also reflect genuine security concerns with different modes of voting. Table 3 shows a small, but consistent pattern of higher belief in fraud where absentee voting is more prevalent. There is some sign, too, that higher rates of early voting are associated with more belief in fraud, though the gaps are smaller.

Conclusions

Absentee voting can be essential for the elderly, those who are traveling, and people with certain disabilities, so states should respect such need and continue to offer mail balloting for those populations. Requests for absentee ballots should be accepted by a variety of means including mail, phone, fax, e-mail, and Internet and mobile technologies. States that do not already do so should consider providing pre-paid postage so that voters may return absentee ballots by mail without additional personal expense. We endorse the Commission's recommendation that local election officials should offer online tools to track that status of absentee ballots. In 2010 roughly 29 states permitted voters to do this.¹⁹ To ensure their use, the tools need to be well designed and advertised.

Many states are already on clear trajectories when it comes to convenience voting. States that rely heavily on mail balloting are unlikely to reverse course abruptly, and so far mail voting remains broadly popular. Arguably, Washington's shift to vote-by-mail was a demand-side phenomenon, driven by voters as much as by decisions made by public officials. Despite the evidence discussed above, few would claim that the vote-by-mail states have the worst systems in the nation. In some regards, Washington and Oregon elections seem to be better run than average.²⁰ On the other hand, the future of the U.S. Postal Service is far from clear, given steadily declining volumes of mail and persistent deficits.²¹ Election officials would be unwise to assume that physical mail as we now know it will continue indefinitely, and must be wary of harnessing their systems to outdated technology. To the degree that states follow the Commission's recommendation to offer more opportunities for pre-Election Day voting, we urge them to prioritize in-person voting over absentee voting by mail to reduce confusion, lost and rejected votes, legal disputes, and public distrust. While cost and public preferences are also important concerns, compared to early voting, absentee balloting has the potential to make the problems of both security and access more acute, increasing the chances for both election crimes and false rejection of valid votes. Hence, wherever greater convenience is a priority, early voting is preferable, as it avoids some of the worst features of absentee voting while carrying fewer unique risks.