Accessibility Archives - National Vote at Home Institute

The Impact of Universal Vote by Mail and Permanent Absentee Voting on Turnout in 2020 and 2022

This memo presents evidence on the efficacy of universal vote by mail (UVBM) and permanent absentee voting (PAV). With UVBM, all registered voters are sent a ballot in the mail without needing to proactively request one. With PAV (also known as “single signup”), voters sign up once to receive ballots in the mail for all subsequent elections.

Like other state voting laws (ID, early voting, etc.), UVBM and PAV may have a significant impact on whether people actually turnout to vote. Both methods significantly reduce the obstacles in the way of voting by bringing the polling place to the voter rather than making the voter go to the polling place. VoteAmerica has conducted a number of analyses aimed at assessing this impact and find that both methods substantially boost voter turnout.

The Expansion of Voting Before Election Day, 2000–2024

The last two decades have seen a large expansion in the number of states offering options to vote before election day, from 24 states in 2000 to 46 states in 2024. Put another way: In the 2000 general election, 40% of all voting-age citizens lived in states that offered at least one option for voting before election day—such as early in-person voting or mail ballots. As of this writing, nearly 97% of all voting-age citizens will live in states that will offer at least one option to vote before election day in the 2024 election.

Disability and Voter Turnout in the 2022 Elections

Based on Census data, voter turnout increased in 2022 by 1.6 points among citizens with disabilities relative to the 2018 midterm elections, while it decreased among citizens without disabilities by 1.6 points.
This increase helped close but did not eliminate the turnout gap between citizens with and without disabilities, which went from -4.8 points in 2018 to -1.5 points in 2022.
The increased turnout among people with disabilities occurred across all disability types and demographic categories—gender, race/ethnicity, age group, and region—but was especially pronounced among young voters with disabilities.

Effect of Mail Applications and Ballots in Nebraska’s 2020 General Election in

In this research prepared for the National Vote at Home Coalition, researchers find that full vote-at-home precincts in Nebraska experienced as much as 4.6 percentage points of greater turnout than polling-place precincts. In addition, automatically mailing absentee ballot applications to all voters helped increase turnout across the state.

Disability and Voting Access Policies in 2020

Many states made policy changes to make it easier to vote in 2020 due to the pandemic, while some states had already provided increased voting access after the 2016 elections. This fact sheet outlines those changes.

Does Voting by Mail Increase Fraud? Estimating the Change in Reported Voter Fraud When States Switch to Elections By Mail

U.S. voters recently participated in the 2020 general election, which determined the next president as well as other public officials at the federal, state, and local level. While Election Day was officially Tuesday, November 3, many voters cast their ballots early—either in person or by mail. This article examines the claim that states can expect more cases of voter fraud when ballots are distributed by mail. It does not consider the consequences of early in-person voting or other challenges facing voting by mail, such as the timeliness of the U.S. Postal Service or the reporting of election results. Nor does it consider whether voters are more likely to incorrectly mark their ballots or whether election workers are more likely to incorrectly reject ballot.

The participatory and partisan impacts of mandatory vote-by-mail

Policy-makers disagree on the merits of mandatory vote-by-mail. Many of these debates hinge on whether mandatory vote-by-mail advantages one political party over the other. Using a unique pairing of historical county-level data that covers the past three decades and more than 40 million voting records from the two states that have conducted a staggered rollout of mandatory vote-by-mail (Washington and Utah), researchers used several methods for causal inference to show that mandatory vote-by-mail slightly increases voter turnout but has no effect on election outcomes at various levels of government. Their results find meaning given contemporary debates about the merits of mandatory vote-by-mail. Mandatory vote-by-mail ensures that citizens are given a safe means of casting their ballot while simultaneously not advantaging one political party over the other.

Disability and Voter Turnout in the 2018 Elections

Rutger’s University analysis of disability turnout finds four and five star Vote at Home states, like Colorado and Arizona, consistently outperform others in reducing the disability voting gap.