New Research Alert: Universal Voting By Mail and Turnout

Yimeng Li and I are happy to announce that our paper, “Universal Mail Ballot Delivery Boosts Turnout: The Causal Effects of Sending Mail Ballots to All Registered Voters”, has been conditionally accepted for publication at the Journal of Politics. We’ve been working on this project for a considerable amount of time — peer reviewers of previous versions of the paper raised some good comments and made some important suggestions that took us some time to look into. The result is a strong paper in which we provide what we argue is one of the most methodologically-robust causal estimates of how much universal voting by mail (UVMB) affects voter turnout.

We take advantage of a unique natural experiment in Southern California, and find that UVMB’s implementation in March 2020 boosted voter turnout by 3-4 percent for voters who do not automatically receive a ballot in the mail. That’s an important estimate, indicating that UVBM can matter in closely contested elections.

As the paper moves into the publication stage we’ll update readers!