Fewer Americans cast their ballots by mail during last year's election, while more voters embraced casting their ballots in-person before Election Day.
New data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that the 2020 presidential election remains a high-water mark for vote by mail usage in a nationwide election.
According to a national survey of local and state election officials that the agency conducts after every major election, "mail voting comprised 30.3% of the turnout for the 2024 election," which is a decrease compared to the 2020 election when mail ballots comprised 43% of turnout.
The commission, however, noted that the share of mail voting last year is still "larger than the percentage of the electorate that voted by mail in pre-pandemic elections." Turnout has also stayed above pre-pandemic levels. During the 2024 election, nearly 65% of the citizen voting age population participated in the general election, which is the second highest turnout in the last five presidential elections.
Mail voting popularity drop-off
The EAC found that in-person voting started to see "a resurgence" in 2022, while mail voting saw a corresponding decrease that year.
"For the 2024 general election, more than two thirds of voters cast their ballots in person either before or on Election Day," the report found. "Approximately three in 10 voters cast their ballots by mail."
Commissioner Donald Palmer told NPR that voters often "have their own preferences" when it comes to methods of casting a ballot, but that can change over time if other methods become available to them.
"And so election officials, what we take away from that is that we need to be prepared and be ready to facilitate different forms of voting," he said.
There are several reasons experts expected that vote by mail was unlikely to be as popular as it was during the pandemic. For one, many states expanded vote by mail for health and safety reasons during the 2020 election, but some reverted back to more limited programs ahead of the 2024 election.
Also, in the wake of the 2020 election, President Trump and Republican lawmakers across the country also spread misinformation aimed at discrediting voting by mail, which eventually led to a slew of laws being passed in recent years that create new limits on this method of voting.
Republicans did embrace mail-in ballots in the 2024 election, encouraging voters to "Bank Your Vote" by getting it in early, in contrast to previous elections.
Despite efforts to limit voting by mail in some states, overall access to the ballot for most Americans has expanded since 2020.
More voters opted to vote early in-person
One of the methods of voting that has become more popular in recent years is in-person early voting. During the last presidential election, more than 158 million ballots were cast and counted and the majority of those ballots were cast in-person — 35.2% of those votes were cast before Election Day and 37.4% on Election Day.
According to the EAC, "for the first time, all states reported offering some form of in-person voting before Election Day."
Palmer said he thinks early in-person voting is one of the most convenient voting options for many Americans.
"It really is convenient to take one of those days in the lead up to Election Day and vote early, particularly if you have to travel or if you've got to be away or you're working," he said. "So I actually think it's just time to take advantage of the convenient voting."
Palmer said there were a lot of bright spots in the report — particularly on the security side of voting. At this point, about 98% of voting jurisdictions have a paper trail for their voting systems. Also, the nationwide rejection rate of mail ballots was only 1.2%, which has remained consistently low in recent years.
Poll worker recruitment
One area where there is still work to be done, Palmer said, is in recruiting "the next generation of poll workers." The aging workforce of poll workers has been an ongoing issue in elections. According to the EAC, the primary demographic working at polling sites are between the ages of 61 and 70.
Because of the pandemic, younger demographics helped out during the 2020 election. But this reverted a bit, Palmer said, during the last election.
"It's going to be a challenge for us as a community to continue to recruit those individuals that really are the backbone of the election," he said. "So we really need the new generation. I guess Gen X needs to step up and start to fill some of these roles as the more elderly population retire or turn over the keys to the folks in the office."
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