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AEIdeas

Michael P. McDonald of the United States Election Project reported yesterday that almost 35 million people have cast ballots in all reporting jurisdictions. McDonald provides some cautionary notes about the data he collects. Some election officials, for example, do not report early voting statistics. Some do not report the information by party. Higher numbers may indicate that convenience voting is simply becoming more popular, not that one party or the other is benefiting.

Early, absentee, or convenience voting has been rising, as our former AEI colleague John Fortier, now at the Bipartisan Policy Center, wrote more than a decade ago in his AEI book, “Absentee and Early Voting: Trends Promises, and Perils.” Fortier described the US as “in the midst of a revolution in voting” in both presidential and off-year elections. Twenty-five years ago, he said, “95 percent of Americans who voted in presidential contests cast their votes on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” In the 1980 presidential election, only around 4 million ballots were cast before Election Day.

In the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out this morning, 35 percent of likely voters report that they had already voted. According to Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies (the NBC/WSJ poll is conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research), the 35 percent “shatters the previous midterm high of 25 percent in 2014.” It also exceeds the 32 percent of early voters in this poll in 2016. McInturff adds “this represents over 40 percent of the vote in the 38 states that allow significant early voting.”

Elections in the US are run locally, but in the aftermath of the 2016 elections there has been a nationwide push to make our election infrastructure secure. Sixty-eight percent told NPR/Marist pollsters in September that paper ballots would make US elections more safe from interference or fraud. Only 7 percent felt that way about internet voting and 36 percent about voting on touch screen machines. According to Verified Voting, a non-partisan, non-governmental organization founded in 2003 to make sure that votes are counted accurately and that our systems are secure, five states went “all in” for electronic voting, and now four are having second thoughts. Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, and South Carolina rely solely on voting machines that produce no paper record. All but Georgia, Verified Voting says, plan to swap out the old machines for new ones. In a new Pew Research Center survey, 85 percent favored requiring electronic voting machines to print a paper back-up of the ballot. In the poll, 34 percent favored conducting all elections by mail. Verified Voting, like the public, believes that internet voting is an idea whose time has not come. Most Americans are confident that their own vote will be counted accurately. They are less confident about all votes in the nation.

Only 21 percent in the Pew survey said that all citizens should be required to vote. Nearly eight in ten disagreed. Thirty-six percent strongly favored making Election Day a national holiday and another 29 percent somewhat favored the idea.

Join the AEI Election Watch team on November 8 for lunch to discuss what happened and what it means. Click here for details.