Americans Mostly Support Voting By Mail
How do you hold an election during a pandemic? Most states are encouraging voters to cast their ballots by mail this November to avoid spreading the coronavirus, and some of them are revising their election laws to make that easier.
Under normal circumstances, 34 states (plus Washington, D.C.) have allowed people to vote absentee for any reason, including five that conduct vote-by-mail elections by default (i.e., every voter is automatically mailed a ballot). But as of Thursday, at least 41 states are allowing anyone to vote absentee this fall, including seven states and Washington, D.C., that will mail voters ballots by default. That leaves approximately 54 million eligible voters across nine states who must provide an excuse to vote absentee this fall (though some of those states may still change their laws before Election Day).
And a new poll out this week found the American people largely supportive of efforts to expand absentee voting. According to the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of adults said that any voter should be able to vote early or absentee without an excuse. Furthermore, an additional 14 percent thought a documented reason should be required, but that COVID-19 should count as one of the reasons. As a result, only 19 percent of Americans believed that voters should need an excuse other than the pandemic to vote absentee.
However, as on so many other issues, Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on this. While a whopping 83 percent of Democrats supported no-excuse absentee voting (and another 11 percent thought COVID-19 should be a valid excuse), only 44 percent of Republicans thought so. Another 17 percent thought COVID-19 should be an acceptable excuse, but that still left 37 percent of Republicans believing voters must provide a non-pandemic-related excuse to vote absentee.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-support-voting-by-mail-but-not-all-of-them-want-to-or-can/
