By Robert Yoon, Related Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Voters had a lot to argue about within the 1972 election, however they overwhelmingly agreed that when it got here time to vote, they’d achieve this in individual on Election Day.
The act of voting was largely a communal expertise that yr, when roughly 95% of voters went to their native polling locations and accomplished and submitted their ballots in individual on a single day, in response to a census survey on the time.
That quantity would fall progressively over the subsequent 50 years as states offered People with extra choices on how and when to vote.
By 2022, solely about half of the citizens voted on the polls on Election Day. The share of individuals voting earlier than Election Day spiked to greater than 70% in 2020, and votes solid by mail surpassed these solid on Election Day for the primary time ever. That yr, many states enacted emergency measures to quickly develop vote-by-mail choices to guard voters from the unfold of COVID-19.
“We’ve been on an upward pattern of early voting over time as extra states have adopted early voting choices and voters have embraced them,” mentioned College of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald, who tracks voter turnout and early voting. “That’s resulted in a higher share of early votes being solid every election cycle.”
For many of that point, advance voting was a nonpartisan function of elections, however a deep chasm shaped between the events on advance voting throughout and because the 2020 presidential election.
Voting earlier than Election Day is rather more frequent in the present day than it was roughly 50 years in the past. But it’s extremely politicized as voting within the 2024 presidential election is already underway.
What’s advance voting?
Advance voting refers back to the vary of choices that folks should vote earlier than Election Day, whether or not by mail or in individual at an election facility.
The time period “early voting” can refer collectively to all voting that takes place earlier than Election Day. Typically it refers explicitly to votes solid in individual at native election places of work or voting facilities earlier than Election Day.
To keep away from confusion, The Related Press typically makes use of phrases like “advance voting” or “pre-Election Day voting” to confer with that broader class and “early in-person voting” for the narrower one. “Absentee voting” often refers to ballots solid by mail.
What are the several types of advance voting?
Voting earlier than Election Day contains each voting by mail and in-person voting performed earlier than Election Day.
Early in-person voting tends to imitate the expertise of voting in individual on Election Day, right down to the kind of voting tools used and the areas serving as voting facilities. The primary distinction is that the voting is performed earlier than Election Day. The size of early in-person voting durations varies by state.
Mail voting will be additional divided into at the very least two smaller classes: “no-excuse absentee voting,” the place any voter could request a mail poll for any purpose, and “excuse-required absentee voting,” the place solely voters with a sound excuse as to why they can’t vote in individual on Election Day could vote by mail.
Requiring an excuse to vote absentee, equivalent to journey or sickness, was the norm in most states. Immediately, a shrinking handful of states nonetheless require voters to supply a licensed excuse.
A 3rd class of mail voting is a hybrid of mail voting and early in-person voting: in-person absentee voting, the place a voter submits (and typically fills out) a mail poll in individual at an elections workplace.
A small however rising variety of states conduct their elections predominantly by mail. These states, plus a number of others and the District of Columbia, robotically ship each registered voter a poll.
When did advance voting start?
Variations of absentee voting and voting over a number of days have been a part of American elections because the nation’s founding. Immediately’s system of mail voting and early in-person voting took root greater than a century in the past. In 1921, Louisiana paved the way in which for a formalized early in-person voting system when its structure specified that “the Legislature could present a technique by which absentee voting shall be permitted aside from by mail.”
Voting by mail is even older, however comparatively few voters had been allowed to reap the benefits of it as of 1972. Simply two years later, Washington grew to become the primary state within the nation to permit any voter to request a mail poll for any purpose.
By 2005, greater than half the states adopted no-excuse absentee voting. Immediately, solely Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire present neither early in-person voting nor no-excuse absentee voting.
Does one political occasion use advance voting greater than the opposite?
Sure, however it wasn’t all the time that method.
Voting earlier than Election Day steadily grew extra in style in each Democratic and Republican-controlled states after 1972. Though there was a partisan cut up in some states that typically diversified from election to election, polling from Gallup exhibits that nationwide there was little partisan divide on advance voting between 2004 and 2016. However the survey confirmed that voters’ plans to make use of early voting sharply diverged alongside occasion strains within the 2020 presidential election.
AP’s VoteCast survey of the 2020 citizens discovered an identical outcome, with further particulars on how the selection of voting methodology divided the citizens. About two-thirds of the votes solid by mail in that election had been for Democrat Joe Biden, in contrast with about one-third for Republican President Donald Trump. In distinction, Trump gained about two-thirds of the in-person Election Day vote, in contrast with about one-third for Biden.
When it got here to early in-person voting, there was a near-even cut up, with Trump having solely the slightest benefit.
Biden overperformed amongst these casting votes earlier than Election Day, particularly amongst mail-in voters, even in lots of states that Trump gained by a large margin, VoteCast confirmed.
“That is simply an across-the-board, nationwide phenomenon,” McDonald mentioned.
These patterns continued within the 2022 midterm elections, with Democrats accounting for the majority of the mail vote, Republicans casting many of the Election Day vote and Republicans holding a small benefit in early in-person voting.
McDonald famous that occasion conduct on pre-Election Day voting was, if something, the other earlier than 2020.
“Individuals who voted by mail tended to be extra Republican than the individuals who voted in-person early,” he mentioned, however these patterns “had been out of the blue turned the other way up” through the pandemic.
What led to the partisan cut up upfront voting?
Throughout the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly disparaged, politicized and undermined mail voting, going so far as to block funding to the U.S. Postal Service to thwart its capacity to course of mail ballots he claimed with out proof had been prone to widespread tampering.
Trump’s messaging on mail balloting has been considerably inconsistent. At instances he has mentioned “absentee voting” is “ good. ” However he additionally has claimed that mail voting is ripe for fraud, one thing not borne out by a long time of mail voting performed in each state. Trump himself has solid mail ballots on a number of events, together with within the 2020 primaries.
Trump’s rhetoric appears to have taken a toll on Republican confidence in mail voting. An AP-NORC Heart for Public Affairs Analysis ballot performed in 2023 discovered that 58% of Republicans weren’t very or by no means assured that mail votes could be counted precisely, in contrast with 32% in 2018. Amongst Democrats, confidence within the counting of mail ballots elevated, from 28% saying they had been very or extraordinarily assured in 2018 to 52% in 2023.
What’s going to advance voting seem like in 2024?
“We have to wait and see how 2024 performs out earlier than we make definitive statements about what the early voting is telling us” concerning the election, McDonald mentioned.
Absentee voting in some states started as early as mid-September, and greater than half the states had begun some sort of voting by Oct. 1.
Related Press author Maya Sweedler contributed to this report.
Learn extra about how U.S. elections work at Explaining Election 2024, a sequence from The Related Press aimed toward serving to make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives help from a number of personal foundations to reinforce its explanatory protection of elections and democracy. See extra about AP’s democracy initiative right here. The AP is solely liable for all content material.