Voting Access: Early, Mail-In & Same-Day

Beyond Election Day

Traditional voting requires showing up at a specific polling place on a specific day during specific hours. Expanded voting methods aim to make participation easier. Early voting allows casting ballots days or weeks before election day. Mail-in (or absentee) voting allows voting from home. Same-day registration allows registering and voting in a single visit. Automatic voter registration enrolls eligible citizens when they interact with government agencies.

Usage of these methods has grown dramatically. In the 2020 US presidential election, roughly 46 percent of voters cast mail-in ballots and 26 percent voted early in person, meaning only about 28 percent voted in the traditional way on election day. Five US states (Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Hawaii, and Utah) conduct elections entirely by mail. Many European countries routinely offer some form of early or postal voting.

The Political Debate

Expanded voting access is politically contested in the United States. Supporters argue that more convenient voting increases turnout and is especially important for people who work multiple jobs, have disabilities, or lack transportation. Research shows that same-day registration increases turnout by 5-7 percentage points and that automatic registration adds millions of voters to the rolls.

Opponents raise security concerns about mail-in voting, arguing that ballots mailed to outdated addresses could be intercepted and that the lack of a controlled polling station environment increases opportunities for coercion or fraud. Research consistently finds that mail-in voting fraud is extremely rare (Oregon, which has voted entirely by mail since 2000, has documented only about a dozen cases of fraud out of more than 100 million ballots). The debate is often a proxy for partisan calculations about who benefits from higher turnout.

Worked Example: Comparing the Methods

Each access method changes the cost of voting differently, and the evidence on turnout effects varies. The table below summarizes what the research broadly finds.

Worked example: reading Oregon's all-mail record

Oregon adopted all-mail voting by ballot measure in 1998 and has run its elections entirely by mail since 2000. Two facts from its record anchor the debate. First, turnout is consistently among the highest in the nation, supporting the convenience argument. Second, the documented fraud rate is roughly a dozen cases across more than 100 million ballots, on the order of one in ten million, undercutting claims that mail voting is inherently insecure. Oregon shows that a well-designed system (ballot tracking, signature verification, a curated voter roll) can make voting both easier and secure, which is why it is the reference case in access debates.