Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Mail-in voting doesn't benefit either party, new study shows

"Mail-in voting doesn't favor one political party over another, nor does it invite more frequent incidents of fraud, according to new research," Danielle Haynes reports for United Press International. "Stanford University's Democracy and Polarization Lab studied the issue by reviewing data from three states that used vote-by-mail between 1996 and 2018. Researchers found the method didn't appear to "affect either party's share of turnout" or "increase either party's vote share." The study did find that mail-in voting increased overall turnout by about 2 percent.

Calls for expanded mail-in voting have increased in recent months because of fears about the safety of in-person voting. But the issue has also become a political football, as Wisconsin's recent primary demonstrated: conservative politicians sought to curtail mail-in voting, believing that it would benefit urban, and therefore more liberal voters.

President Trump and other Republican lawmakers have voiced opposition to expanded mail-in voting, saying that it could increase voting fraud; conservative voters, perhaps keying in on that messaging, are far less likely to approve of expanding it. "According to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 58% of Americans favor permanently changing election laws to allow everyone to vote by mail. But just 31% of Republicans agree, compared to 82% of Democrats. And 61% of those who say they get their news from Fox News oppose vote-by-mail," Abby Phillip reports for CNN.

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