By Robert Yoon, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — There was lots for voters to argue about within the 1972 election, but they overwhelmingly agreed that when it got here time to vote, they might vote in person on Election Day.
The act of voting that 12 months was largely a communal experience, with about 95% of voters going to their local polling stations on a single day and filling out and casting their ballots in person, the study said a census survey on the time.
That number would progressively decline over the following 50 years as states gave Americans more selections about how and once they could vote.
In 2022, only about half of voters solid their votes on election day. The proportion of individuals Voting before election day increased sharply In 2020, the number rose to over 70%, and for the primary time ever, votes solid by mail exceeded votes solid on Election Day. This 12 months, many states enacted emergency measures to temporarily expand mail-in voting options and protect voters from the spread of COVID-19.
“We've seen an upward trend in early voting over time as more states have adopted early voting and voters have embraced it,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor on the University of Florida who studies voter turnout and voting early voting tracked. “This has resulted in a larger proportion of early votes being cast each election cycle.”
For most of its time, early voting has been a bipartisan feature of elections, but a deep divide over early voting has formed between parties during and for the reason that 2020 presidential election.
Voting before Election Day is much more common today than it was about 50 years ago. Still, it’s as highly politicized as voting within the 2024 presidential election already underway.
What is a pre-vote?
“Early voting” refers back to the selections available to people before Election Day, whether by mail or in person at a voting facility.
The term “early voting” can collectively confer with all voting that takes place before Election Day. Sometimes it specifically refers to votes solid in person at local election offices or polling stations before Election Day.
To avoid confusion, The Associated Press generally uses terms resembling “advance voting” or “vote before Election Day” to confer with this broader category and “early in-person voting” to confer with the narrower category. “Postal voting” generally means voting by postal vote.
What several types of pre-voting are there?
Voting before Election Day includes each absentee voting and in-person voting before Election Day.
Early in-person voting is usually much like the experience of voting in person on Election Day, right all the way down to the kind of voting equipment used and the locations that function vote centers. The important difference is that voting is conducted before Election Day. The length of early in-person voting periods varies by state.
Absentee voting may be further divided into no less than two smaller categories: “no-excuse absentee voting,” where any voter can request an absentee ballot for any reason, and “excused absentee voting,” where only voters with a legitimate excuse can vote as why they’re on Election Day If you can not vote in person, you may vote by postal vote.
It was common practice in most states to require a reason for the absence, resembling travel or illness. Today, a shrinking variety of states still require voters to supply a legitimate excuse.
A 3rd category of absentee voting is a combination of absentee voting and early in-person voting: in-person absentee voting, by which a voter submits (and sometimes fills out) an absentee ballot in person at an election office.
A small but growing variety of states conduct their elections primarily by mail-in voting. Those states, in addition to several others and the District of Columbia, robotically send a ballot to each registered voter.
When did the preliminary voting begin?
Variations on mail-in voting and multi-day voting have been a part of American elections for the reason that country's founding. Today's system of absentee voting and early in-person voting took hold greater than a century ago. In 1921, Louisiana paved the way in which for a formalized early in-person voting system Constitution specified that “the Legislature may provide for a method by which absentee voting is permitted by means other than absentee voting.”
Postal voting is even older, but as of 1972 relatively few voters were allowed to make use of it. Just two years later, Washington became the primary state within the country to permit every voter to accomplish that request a postal vote for some reason.
By 2005, greater than half of the states implemented no-excuse absentee voting. Today, only Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire don’t offer early in-person voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Does one political party use the first more often than the opposite?
Yes, however it wasn't all the time like that.
Voting before Election Day became increasingly popular after 1972 in each Democratic- and Republican-controlled states. Although there was a partisan divide in some states, sometimes various from election to election, Gallup poll shows that there was little partisan disagreement on early voting nationwide between 2004 and 2016. However, the poll showed that voters' plans to make use of early voting within the 2020 presidential election varied widely along party lines.
AP's VoteCast poll of the 2020 electorate found the same result, with additional details on how selection of voting method divided the electorate. About two-thirds of votes solid by mail on this election went to Democrat Joe Biden, compared with a few third to Republican President Donald Trump. By contrast, Trump won about two-thirds of the in-person votes on Election Day, in comparison with a few third for Biden.
Early in-person voting was almost evenly split, with Trump having only the slightest advantage.
According to VoteCast, Biden outperformed amongst those that solid ballots before Election Day, particularly amongst mail-in voters, even in lots of states where Trump won by large margins.
“This is just a general, national phenomenon,” McDonald said.
This pattern continued into the 2022 midterm elections, with Democrats accounting for the majority of absentee voting, Republicans casting the majority of Election Day votes, and Republicans having a small advantage in early in-person voting.
McDonald noted that before 2020, the party's behavior in pre-Election Day voting was quite the alternative.
“People who voted by mail tended to be more Republican than those who voted early in person,” he said, but those patterns were “suddenly turned on their head” throughout the pandemic.
What led to the partisan divide in the first?
During the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly repeated degrading, politicized and undermined postal votinggo that far Block funding for the US Postal Service to thwart his ability to process mail-in ballots that he claimed, without evidence, were vulnerable to widespread manipulation.
Trump's message about postal voting was somewhat inconsistent. Sometimes he said that “postal voting” was “ Good. “But he has also claimed that mail-in voting is vulnerable to fraud, which is not borne out by decades of mail-in voting in every state. Trump himself has cast mail-in ballots several times, including in the 2020 primaries.
Trump's rhetoric appears to have dented Republicans' confidence in mail-in voting. A 2023 poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 58% of Republicans were not very or not at all confident that mail-in votes would be counted correctly, compared to 32% in 2018. Confidence was low among Democrats in the counting of mail-in ballots increased from 28% in 2018 to 52% in 2023.
What will the primary election look like in 2024?
“We’ll have to wait and see how 2024 plays out before we make any definitive statements about what early voting tells us,” McDonald said.
In some states, mail-in voting began as early as mid-September, and greater than half of states had begun some type of voting by October 1.
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