I see this come up a lot in discussions about voting in America. Postal votes disproportionately go to Democrats, hence the Democrats want to expand postal voting while Republicans want to restrict it (and insist there is totally a bunch of fraud going on).
I’ve googled with a few search engines and haven’t found a convincing reason. Lots of evidence that the skew is real, but no explanation as to why. Indeed, if one just looks at demographics, one would expect postal voting to benefit Republicans by facilitating votes from people in the countryside who live far away from voting centers.
So what actually gives?
voting favours dems. Easier voting favours voting.
It’s just covid, before covid mail votes were proportional, then voting by mail was encouraged to avoid spreading covid. That made the number of Democrats voting by mail go up and the number of Republicans go down out of spite. Republican politicians just followed the reflex of Republican voters to resent prosocial behavior and tried to make use of it.
Its kinda funny because its actually older folk that actually need it. When available though I think left folk like it. I likenot having to write myself a cheat sheet and can just fill out the ballot while I research the canidates.
Maga still hasn’t figured out how to lick a stamp.
That can’t be true. Licking a stamp can’t be much different than licking a boot.
I think it’s more likely that they’re illiterate. Mailing a letter requires you to write the destination address. Something they can’t figure out.
Their poor wives.
The more people that vote, the more people vote democrat. republicans are doing literally everything they can to disenfranchise voters, because it’s the only way they can win elections. I mean, they stole the last presidential election after failing to do it the previous time. I’m not so sure we’ll have an election in 2028, the pipeline of “sending untrained militia into the streets hoping to spark an incident that allows them an excuse to invoke martial law and cancel elections” is running very smoothly.
People who vote dem are people with more interesting things to do than stand in line for hours.
Because democrat voters out number Republican voters. If you increase the votes you increase the democrat votes by nature of increasing the number of votes collected. This isn’t factoring secondaries like demographics.
This explanation doesn’t make sense mathematically, though. If the ratio of Democrat to Republican voters is fairly consistent amongst groups, increasing the number of people in any given group that votes will result in that same ratio, just with greater numbers. Saying otherwise is like saying you can add 2% milk to 2% milk to eventually get back to whole milk
The only way voting by mail helps Democrats is if the vote by mail crowd has a heavier democratic skew.
Except when you add in the element of access to voting. Voting in-person on a work day isn’t necessarily feasible for the average American. By enforcing in-person voting you disenfranchise the groups that are more heavily democratic (younger, working, lower/middle class).
Republicans are fewer in number but far more reliable voters.
Brainwashed people do be like “Yes master” without fail.
If fewer people vote, it often favors the republicans. When more people vote it goes the other way. If it’s 60:40 and 100 people vote that’s 20 people. If it’s a thousand it’s 200 more people. I have a strong suspicion that the Republican party has been cheating for a long time which is why they claim the democrats have to be when they win. They always tell on themselves.
Let me show you an example. Let’s use easy ratios for easy numbers, so let’s say people vote Democrat to Republican 3:2.
If you have 100 people vote, you’ll end up with 60 democratic votes, 40 Republican.
If you have 200 people vote, you’ll have 120 Democrat votes, 80 Republican.
Increasing the number of total voters in this scenario will never change the outcome. 400 people? 240 to 160.
The only way getting more votes by mail will help Democrats win an election is if the ratio of Democrat to Republican voters is higher in mail-in voters compared to other population groups.
Or are you suggesting Democrats are less reliable voters, so getting them to vote increases the relative percentage of Democrat voters?
That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.
I now understand and agree completely!
It doesn’t. Florida is an example.
Cities tend to be more democratic than their surrounding area, but also tend to be more densely populated. So you can have a situation like this with hours long lines in busy areas, which heavily disrupt people’s ability to have their vote registered.
So! The answer to that problem is mail-in voting! Vote in advance, with no lines, on your schedule! But the problem with city voting isn’t always an accident, and so mail-in voting has obviously got to go too.
But anyway, I think that’s your answer. It swings Democrat because other things have already happened to make voting in Democrat areas worse in other ways, and this seemed like a good alternative.
Yeah. It is important to note that mail-in voting is only like this in states executing various forms of voter suppression.
For western states that don’t have this tradition of voter suppression, the results tend to be more mixed. For instance, Colorado saw Republicans get a bump when switching to mail-in ballots as it was thought that mobility hindered elderly voters found it easier to vote from home than have to travel to vote.
When you can control where the polling locations are, you can drastically under serve areas that don’t vote republican. This discourages or even makes completely impossible voting in some areas. I live in a wealthy republican suburb. In the last 25 years there has never been much of a line to vote at any time of day. I can usually get in, vote, and be out in 15 minutes. Within a 20 minute drive of me, there are polling locations that have lines which take many hours to get through. Many people have to take time off of work, or leave their kids home alone to vote. Some people can’t stand in line for that long due to health issues.
While mail in voting enables traveling businessmen, college students, military, the elderly and sick to vote - which probably doesn’t overly favor either party - it does disrupt the polling location engineering which is intentionally designed to favor one party over the other.
Work.
Working people can’t take off time to vote. Poor people can’t take off time to vote. Students, teachers, can’t take off time to vote. So in-person voting favors retirees, wealthy people, and business owners like farmers who can set their own hours.
Transport too. For a poor person getting to a specific place on a specific day is a thing. It’s probably doable but if it’s not a priority… and both sides are the same… and your kid is unwell… and your vote doesn’t really make a difference.
OTOH a postal vote is very achievable.
Voting in cities is crazy. Like hours long wait times, you have to be very determined to vote. In person voting is much easier in less densely populated areas. Cities tend to be more liberal.
Depends on the local government in those cities. I’ve always lived in cities and never had to wait more than 5 minutes to vote.
Anything that increases access to polls helps Dems because people like their policies more than the cruelty at the heart of fascism
States with Republican control also have weird rules limiting number of polling places. Sometimes it’s like “1 polling location per county” where a rural county of 5,000 does just fine with 1 polling location. But then a city with millions of people also gets 1. The goal is to create lines around the block in cities, where people will simply give up rather than vote. Cities favor Democrats, so Republicans try to limit voter turnout in cities.
Voting by mail completely eliminates these artificial hurdles.
WTF? Is this true? That’s insane! My mid/east European village with 2,5k people (including children) has 4 polling locations so nobody can argue it’s too far for them. It’s also possible to register yourself beforehand and than you can vote wherever you want (either inside the country or at embassy abroad).
America is a hovel where there are few rights for workers. They literally can’t afford to take time off work to vote, and Republicans make it as hard as possible for them to vote in person, by removing transport options, and closing polls at ridiculously early times. Most Republican controlled states close polls at 7pm.
Access to voting is the foundation of democracy. Sane systems try to minimize any “pressure” to not vote, for any reason, because any such pressure is very likely to hit some demographics harder than others. The Republicans in particular rather blatantly rely on weaponizing this as a way of subverting democratic principles, by making it disproportionately hard to vote if you’re working, or poor, or young, or a minority of pretty much any kind.
Therefore, anything that increases access to voting, and levels the playing field, is worse for the GOP than being able to keep up the status quo of voter suppression. Hence their extremely shrill opposition to mail, and also the (“hilarious”) claims of “fraud” - painting the picture of your democracy being subverted is a handy talking point while you’re busy subverting your democracy.
So the boring answer is that your question is sort of back-to-front: it’s not that the mail ballots are skewed as such, it’s that access to in-person voting is. Mail ballots favor the Democrats because it is their voter base that’s (in this case, anyway) being suppressed.
