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?
It’s probably complex, but the end result is that it benefits democrats and that’s the important part. The way politics works is that you work backwards from the outcome you want, creating the narrative to drive to that outcome. Republicans don’t like mail in voting because it benefits democrats. Democrats like mail in voting because it benefits them. Same with the voter ID conversation. It’s actually pretty easy to create conspiracies to support narratives. In the case of mail in voting you can say that it’s easy to commit fraud and that’s why it shouldn’t be allowed. But how do you disprove that? Especially to the people who find it convenient to believe it.
Republican voters skew older (retired) so if you make voting difficult for people, the ones with more free time are the ones more likely to vote.
The easier it is for everyone to vote, the less the Republicans are favored.
Mail in ballots would also favor rural voters but I guess there are not enough of them for the conservatives to worry about?
But in short - no, the mix of voters does not stay the same as it increases.
Work.
Working people can’t take off time to vote. Poor people can’t take off time to vote. Students, teachers, can’t take off time to vote. So in-person voting favors retirees, wealthy people, and business owners like farmers who can set their own hours.
Transport too. For a poor person getting to a specific place on a specific day is a thing. It’s probably doable but if it’s not a priority… and both sides are the same… and your kid is unwell… and your vote doesn’t really make a difference.
OTOH a postal vote is very achievable.
Anything that increases access to polls helps Dems because people like their policies more than the cruelty at the heart of fascism
its also harder to suppress the votes, than in person. in person gop can restrict voting times, the places, and how long it remains open, and voting machines are rigged ALWAYS in GOP favor, plus they cant use other forms of voting suppression as easily. the same methods against DEM districts, they wont do in RED ones.
When you can control where the polling locations are, you can drastically under serve areas that don’t vote republican. This discourages or even makes completely impossible voting in some areas. I live in a wealthy republican suburb. In the last 25 years there has never been much of a line to vote at any time of day. I can usually get in, vote, and be out in 15 minutes. Within a 20 minute drive of me, there are polling locations that have lines which take many hours to get through. Many people have to take time off of work, or leave their kids home alone to vote. Some people can’t stand in line for that long due to health issues.
While mail in voting enables traveling businessmen, college students, military, the elderly and sick to vote - which probably doesn’t overly favor either party - it does disrupt the polling location engineering which is intentionally designed to favor one party over the other.
Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump urged his voters to vote in person while Democrats promoted voting by mail due to Covid pandemic. Steve Bannon was secretly recorded saying that this was the Trump Campaign’s plan to falsely claim the election was stolen. Steve Bannon does not deny saying this. By law, votes can’t be tallied until polls close. Mail in ballots take longer to process because envelopes have to be opened, info needs to be verified then the vote can be counted. In person ballot results are faster because verification has already taken place and in many places ballots are scanned waiting to counted by a machine. Of course this is how it went down.
So to answer your question, Republican voters have a distrust for mail in voting. Largely because a president of the United States told his supporters to vote in person. During a pandemic.
Access to voting is the foundation of democracy. Sane systems try to minimize any “pressure” to not vote, for any reason, because any such pressure is very likely to hit some demographics harder than others. The Republicans in particular rather blatantly rely on weaponizing this as a way of subverting democratic principles, by making it disproportionately hard to vote if you’re working, or poor, or young, or a minority of pretty much any kind.
Therefore, anything that increases access to voting, and levels the playing field, is worse for the GOP than being able to keep up the status quo of voter suppression. Hence their extremely shrill opposition to mail, and also the (“hilarious”) claims of “fraud” - painting the picture of your democracy being subverted is a handy talking point while you’re busy subverting your democracy.
So the boring answer is that your question is sort of back-to-front: it’s not that the mail ballots are skewed as such, it’s that access to in-person voting is. Mail ballots favor the Democrats because it is their voter base that’s (in this case, anyway) being suppressed.
Because democrat voters out number Republican voters. If you increase the votes you increase the democrat votes by nature of increasing the number of votes collected. This isn’t factoring secondaries like demographics.
This explanation doesn’t make sense mathematically, though. If the ratio of Democrat to Republican voters is fairly consistent amongst groups, increasing the number of people in any given group that votes will result in that same ratio, just with greater numbers. Saying otherwise is like saying you can add 2% milk to 2% milk to eventually get back to whole milk
The only way voting by mail helps Democrats is if the vote by mail crowd has a heavier democratic skew.
Republicans are fewer in number but far more reliable voters.
Brainwashed people do be like “Yes master” without fail.
Except when you add in the element of access to voting. Voting in-person on a work day isn’t necessarily feasible for the average American. By enforcing in-person voting you disenfranchise the groups that are more heavily democratic (younger, working, lower/middle class).
Really? In Canada it’s law to allow employees time during the work day to go vote. That’s not the case in the US?
It’s state by state whether it’s required and/or paid time off. Additionally, just because something is in the law doesn’t mean every employer is good about it.
That’s nuts. I hope Americans can pull up from this nosedive, even if the time to get back flying is over and all they can get is a controlled crash.
Maga still hasn’t figured out how to lick a stamp.
Their poor wives.
The more people that vote, the more people vote democrat. republicans are doing literally everything they can to disenfranchise voters, because it’s the only way they can win elections. I mean, they stole the last presidential election after failing to do it the previous time. I’m not so sure we’ll have an election in 2028, the pipeline of “sending untrained militia into the streets hoping to spark an incident that allows them an excuse to invoke martial law and cancel elections” is running very smoothly.
its because poastal is harder to RIG and suppress than in person voting. gop controlled areas use voter machines that are often rigged. its also hard to voter suppress since closing polling stations, removing times and place likely doesnt affect how much votes get counted. thats why the GOP has to use things like voter purges, voter deregistration, voter ID(which is voter disenfranchisement to be honest) and the most recent tactic in the 2024 election, immediately STOP counting the votes.
gop controlled areas use voter machines that are often rigged
I’ve got a bridge I could sell you that would look marvelous next to that tin foil cap you’re wearing.
