Democrats are changing how they vote, requesting fewer mail ballots than in past elections but returning the ones they do request more quickly, according to a new NBC News Decision Desk analysis of the early vote conducted in coordination with the University of Pennsylvania.The findings, which come less than four weeks before Election Day, reflect a midterm landscape shaped by concerns about mail-in voting and doubts about the reliability of the U.S.Postal Service.
The shift among Democrats suggests they may be abandoning mail ballots in favor of in person voting, or taking precautions to ensure their ballot arrives on time.The implications could be significant.
Since 2020, Democrats have been far more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, creating predictable patterns in how early election tallies shift as additional votes are counted.But if those habits are changing, it will be more difficult to gauge which party has more enthusiasm from early voting figures, while the now-familiar red and blue “mirages” seen on recent election nights could unfold differently.For the analysis, we compared current and historical data on mail ballot requests and returns at the same point in time across four states: North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
We gathered publicly available data from three states and sourced Virginia data from L2, a leading voter data firm.Trump order supercharges concerns about the Postal Service President Donald Trump has long attacked mail voting as rife with unfounded claims of fraud.Heading into the midterms, his administration exerted increased control over the Postal Service, whose slowed delivery times had already prompted voting rights groups and Democrats to push their voters to consider using other methods of voting.
Just months before the first mail ballots of the midterm elections were scheduled to go out, the Postal Service followed a Trump directive to impose new rules about how election officials could send those ba...