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?

  • protist@mander.xyzEnglish
    19·
    14 hours ago

    Until very recently, Republicans had an edge in mail-in voting, however after Trump started deriding it, a not small number of Republican voters stopped using it.

    Also skewing the numbers is that Democratic-led states largely allow everyone to vote by mail if they’d like, whereas Republican-led states strictly limit mail-in voting to people who meet certain criteria. This means that Democrats are overrepresented when you look at a national count. Oregon and Washington don’t even have in-person voting, only vote by mail. Republican-led states limiting mail-in voting predates Trump though, because they try to limit anything they can related to voting.

    • RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world
      10·
      14 hours ago

      Good point. This was part of Trump’s plan in 2020. He told his followers to vote in person, then declared victory on election night before any mail ballots could be realistically counted. Playing into the idea that it was “stolen” because “he was ahead on election night.” Which only happened because he specifically told all his followers NOT to vote by mail.