How voting before Election Day became so widespread and so political

By Robert Yoon, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Voters had plenty to argue about in the 1972 election, but they overwhelmingly agreed that when it came time to vote, they would do so in person on Election Day.

The act of voting was largely a communal experience that year, when roughly 95% of voters went to their local polling places and completed and submitted their ballots in person on a single day, according to a census survey at the time.

That number would fall gradually over the next 50 years as states provided Americans with more options on how and when to vote.

By 2022, only about half of the electorate voted at the polls on Election Day. The share of people voting before Election Day spiked to more than 70% in 2020, and votes cast by mail surpassed those cast on Election Day for the first time ever. That year, many states enacted emergency measures to temporarily expand vote-by-mail options to protect voters from the spread of COVID-19.

“We’ve been on an upward trend of early voting over time as more states have adopted early voting options and voters have embraced them,” said University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald, who tracks voter turnout and early voting. “That’s resulted in a greater share of early votes being cast each election cycle.”

For most of that time, advance voting was a nonpartisan feature of elections, but a deep chasm formed between the parties on advance voting during and since the 2020 presidential election.

Voting before Election Day is much more common today than it was roughly 50 years ago. Yet it is highly politicized as voting in the 2024 presidential election is already underway.

What is advance voting?

Advance voting refers to the range of options that people have to vote before Election Day, whether by mail or in person at an election facility.

The term “early voting” can refer collectively to all voting that takes place before Election Day. Sometimes it refers explicitly to votes cast in person at local election offices or voting centers before Election Day.

To avoid confusion, The Associated Press generally uses terms like “advance voting” or “pre-Election Day voting” to refer to that broader category and “early in-person voting” for the narrower one. “Absentee voting” usually refers to ballots cast by mail.

What are the different types of advance voting?

Voting before Election Day includes both voting by mail and in-person voting conducted before Election Day.

Early in-person voting tends to mimic the experience of voting in person on Election Day, down to the type of voting equipment used and the locations serving as voting centers. The main difference is that the voting is conducted before Election Day. The length of early in-person voting periods varies by state.

Mail voting can be further divided into at least two smaller categories: “no-excuse absentee voting,” where any voter may request a mail ballot for any reason, and “excuse-required absentee voting,” where only voters with a valid excuse as to why they cannot vote in person on Election Day may vote by mail.

Requiring an excuse to vote absentee, such as travel or illness, used to be the norm in most states. Today, a shrinking handful of states still require voters to provide an authorized excuse.

A third category of mail voting is a hybrid of mail voting and early in-person voting: in-person absentee voting, where a voter submits (and sometimes fills out) a mail ballot in person at an elections office.

A small but growing number of states conduct their elections predominantly by mail. Those states, plus a few others and the District of Columbia, automatically send every registered voter a ballot.

When did advance voting begin?

Variations of absentee voting and voting over multiple days have been part of American elections since the nation’s founding. Today’s system of mail voting and early in-person voting took root more than a century ago. In 1921, Louisiana paved the way for a formalized early in-person voting system when its constitution specified that “the Legislature may provide a method by which absentee voting will be permitted other than by mail.”

Voting by mail is even older, but relatively few voters were allowed to take advantage of it as of 1972. Just two years later, Washington became the first state in the nation to allow any voter to request a mail ballot for any reason.

By 2005, more than half the states adopted no-excuse absentee voting. Today, only Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire provide neither early in-person voting nor no-excuse absentee voting.

Does one political party use advance voting more than the other?

Yes, but it wasn’t always that way.

Voting before Election Day steadily grew more popular in both Democratic and Republican-controlled states after 1972. Although there was a partisan split in some states that sometimes varied from election to election, polling from Gallup shows that nationwide there was little partisan divide on advance voting between 2004 and 2016. But the survey showed that voters’ plans to use early voting sharply diverged along party lines in the 2020 presidential election.

AP’s VoteCast survey of the 2020 electorate found a similar result, with additional details on how the choice of voting method divided the electorate. About two-thirds of the votes cast by mail in that election were for Democrat Joe Biden, compared with about one-third for Republican President Donald Trump. In contrast, Trump won about two-thirds of the in-person Election Day vote, compared with about one-third for Biden.

When it came to early in-person voting, there was a near-even split, with Trump having only the slightest advantage.

Biden overperformed among those casting votes before Election Day, especially among mail-in voters, even in many states that Trump won by a wide margin, VoteCast showed.

“This is just an across-the-board, national phenomenon,” McDonald said.

These patterns continued in the 2022 midterm elections, with Democrats accounting for the bulk of the mail vote, Republicans casting most of the Election Day vote and Republicans holding a small advantage in early in-person voting.

McDonald noted that party behavior on pre-Election Day voting was, if anything, the opposite before 2020.

“People who voted by mail tended to be more Republican than the people who voted in-person early,” he said, but those patterns “were suddenly turned upside down” during the pandemic.

What led to the partisan split in advance voting?

During the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly disparaged, politicized and undermined mail voting, going as far as to block funding to the U.S. Postal Service to thwart its ability to process mail ballots he claimed without evidence were susceptible to widespread tampering.

Trump’s messaging on mail balloting has been somewhat inconsistent. At times he has said “absentee voting” is “ good. ” But he also has claimed that mail voting is ripe for fraud, something not borne out by decades of mail voting conducted in every state. Trump himself has cast mail ballots on multiple occasions, including in the 2020 primaries.

Trump’s rhetoric seems to have taken a toll on Republican confidence in mail voting. An AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in 2023 found that 58% of Republicans were not very or not at all confident that mail votes would be counted accurately, compared with 32% in 2018. Among Democrats, confidence in the counting of mail ballots increased, from 28% saying they were very or extremely confident in 2018 to 52% in 2023.

What will advance voting look like in 2024?

“We need to wait and see how 2024 plays out before we make definitive statements about what the early voting is telling us” about the election, McDonald said.

Absentee voting in some states began as early as mid-September, and more than half the states had begun some type of voting by Oct. 1.

Associated Press writer Maya Sweedler contributed to this report.

Read more about how U.S. elections work at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.