Tag Archives: Mail Voting

Pew’s Post-Election Findings

By Jim Ellis

The candidates in action at the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio: President Donald Trump (left) and former vice president Joe Biden.

July 8, 2021 — The Pew Research Center conducted a post-election poll and spent seven months developing their conclusions. On the last day of June, they publicized their report.

The study, conducted just after the November election (Nov. 7-12; 11,818 individuals through groups of screened panelists, online) was exhaustive.

Quoting the methodology description, “noncitizens and those who refused the citizenship question (N=450), voters who refused to answer the vote choice question (N=84) and panelists who declined to provide their names and thus could not be matched to a voter record (N=139) were removed, leaving 11,145 panelists for analysis.” Of this latter number, 9,668 respondents were validated as voters, meaning the research team verified with a local election office that the particular individual had in fact voted.

The basic voter segmentation conclusions were speculated upon in most media sectors during the early post-election period, but this research validates and expands upon the discovered patterns. Largely, President Biden received a significant boost from suburban voters, which proved the major difference in his increasing Democratic popular vote performance.

Despite losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, former President Trump surprisingly improved his standing with several groups such as Hispanics, Asians, black men, young voters, and women, but not to the degree necessary to counter Biden’s strength with suburban voters.

For example, among suburban voters, according to the Pew research, Biden recorded 54 percent support as compared to Hillary Clinton’s 45 percent in the 2016 election. Conversely, Trump only carried white voters 51-47 percent in the most current election, a major reduction from the 54-38 percent spread he posted four years earlier.

While Trump declined in the suburbs, his performance among rural voters was even stronger than his 2016 benchmark. In 2020, Trump’s percentage among rural voters rose to 65 percent from his 59 percent previous showing. Additionally, rural female voters largely account for his overall increase among women as he moved from 39 percent in ’16 to 44 percent in 2020.

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Beneath the Numbers

By Jim Ellis

Is Maine Sen. Susan Collins (R) in trouble?

July 30, 2020 — Two Senate polls were released earlier this week, and though the ballot tests in Maine and South Carolina didn’t show us anything particularly new, the pollsters asked their respective sampling universes some interesting ancillary questions.

Colby College, a Waterville, Maine institution housing approximately 1,800 students, released its second political poll of 2020 in conjunction with the McVey Data Science Initiative. The questions touched upon the presidential and Senate ballot tests but delved deeper into the attitudes and perspectives of their 888-person sample over the July 18-24 period.

The presidential ballot test found former vice president Joe Biden leading President Trump statewide, 50-38 percent. The Senate ballot test was closer in that former state House speaker Sara Gideon (D) leads Sen. Susan Collins (R), 44-39 percent.

In looking deeper, it is probable that the actual race standings are likely a bit closer. There appears to be a Democratic skew in that all favorability indexes for Democratic public officials were positive and those of the tested Republican officials were decidedly negative. Additionally, 52 percent of the sampling universe comes from the state’s southern congressional district, the 1st, which is decidedly more liberal than the northern 2nd District. Together, these factors provide us the indication that the results are a few points more favorable for Democrats than what we might see in actual voting.

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Monitoring Mail-in Vote Turnout

By Jim Ellis

July 7, 2020 — With many states emphasizing mail voting as a way to increase voter participation in the COVID-19 era, has adoption of near universal mail voting in the states that have done so achieved its fundamental purpose, or has it caused more problems than it solved?

Voter turnout is always a definitive factor in determining election outcomes, and the push to change voting procedures has occurred in 31 state primaries. Therefore, the voting system alterations, should they continue into the general election, will most likely have a major impact upon the electoral outcomes.

Most of the states adopting change only expanded their mail absentee ballot procedures for the primaries; therefore, we can expect another round of battles over the general election processes to soon come before legislatures and courts.

Many of the states, Maryland, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New York to name several, had administrative problems with their expanded mail programs including reports of homes receiving multiple ballots because inactive voters were forced to be mailed, some people requesting absentee ballots and not receiving them, and long post-election counting periods because of the large number of mail ballots coming into the county clerk’s offices.

New York, in fact, has still not even completed its unofficial tabulation and the primary was June 23. The Clark County (Nevada) County Clerk said publicly that the directive to mail inactive voters led to chaos in the state primary since so many ballots were being sent to individuals no longer living at the mailed address.

Largely, Democrats and voting rights organizations are attempting to persuade legislatures, governors, and/or the courts to expand the mail absentee ballot voting option to all registered voters both active and inactive, enact same-day voter registration, adopt ballot harvesting, which allows any individual to collect ballots from voters and turn them into county election authorities (this process is only legal in California, to date), and allow ballots to be post-marked on Election Day as opposed to requiring that they be received on voting day. Republicans and conservative organizations typically object to most of these ideas on verification grounds.

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Turnout 2020: Up, then Down

By Jim Ellis

June 8, 2020 — In most political campaigns, the final electoral result is determined not necessarily from transforming undecided individuals into positive votes, but rather ensuring that the candidate’s committed supporters actually cast their ballot. Therefore, accurately projecting and influencing voter turnout becomes critical for every campaign.

Before the COVID-19 virus struck, many analysts and political prognosticators were predicting a record turnout in the 2020 general election, thus exceeding 2016’s all-time high 136.8 million presidential election ballots. Many stated that breaking 150 million voters was possible, with some even believing that was likely. The post-COVID primary vote participation figures now suggest otherwise, however.

There is a big difference in voter turnout before and after the COVID-19 virus attack. Prior to the March 18 societal shutdown, 25 states had held presidential primary or major caucus elections, meaning up to and including the March 17 election date in Arizona, Florida, and Illinois. North Dakota and Wyoming, because of the small attendance figures in their caucuses and reporting system, are not included in this matrix.

By mid-March, former vice president Joe Biden had broken away from the pack of Democratic candidates, and all of his major opponents had either dropped out of the race or were headed down that path. When voters cast their ballots on March 17, only Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) were advancing to the April 7 primary in Wisconsin.

Through March 17, Democratic primary turnout was up substantially from 2016, and on projected pace to meet the high turnout general election predictions if such a trend continued throughout the remainder of the election year. Republican turnout was down substantially in comparison to 2016, but that is obviously because President Trump had no serious opposition for re-nomination. Therefore, only the Democratic turnout numbers are viable for making statistically relevant calculations and projections.

Through the 25 tested presidential primaries ending March 17, turnout was up 14.8 percent when compared to the open race four years ago in the 17 states that held primary or major caucus elections in both 2016 and 2020. Since the COVID shutdown, however, Democratic voter participation has fallen. In the 11 post-COVID states that held Democratic primary elections in both 2016 and 2020, turnout dropped 21.2 percent when comparing the participation figures from the aforementioned election years.

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Mail Voting Polarization

By Jim Ellis

COVID-19 virus

May 4, 2020 — The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected everyday life, going even so far as touching American voting procedures. Before the pandemic hit, for example, just four states conducted their elections exclusively through the mail (Oregon, Washington) or predominantly so, meaning having few polling places (California, Colorado).

With so many early primary states postponing their primary elections in conjunction with the disease precautions, we now see either all-mail systems, or including the mail option for all voters, being utilized for upcoming primary elections in 20 additional states, and the list keeps growing.

Predictably, progressive left voter organizations are using the pandemic as a catalyst to push for their long-term election systemic goals. Lawsuits around the country are being filed in such places as Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, and several other states, to expand the all-mail option from the primaries into the general election. And, once the all-mail system has been instituted in places around the country, thus establishing it as an electoral fixture, the process becomes much easier to make permanent.

Additionally, we are seeing further lawsuits filed to include automatic voter registration, prohibiting the purging of registration names of people who consistently haven’t voted in multiple elections, and the controversial ballot harvesting idea that allows any voter to collect ballots and deliver them to election authorities.

The Pew Research Center just completed a nationwide survey, testing the population about their attitudes and perceptions of these types of procedural issues. It came as no surprise that the survey results produced rather polarizing responses from the self-identified affiliates of the two major political parties, since virtually every contemporary issue yields deep divides between the partisans.

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