Scientific Forecasts Increased Voter Support for Vote-by-Mail and Mail-Only Elections

Why This Study? Public officials, election administrators, and scholars faced urgent decisions in spring 2020 about how to run the November election safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thad Kousser, Seth Hill, Mackenzie Lockhart, Jennifer L. Merolla, and Mindy Romero measure how eligible American voters wanted the election run and whether exposure to scientific pandemic projections changed those preferences.

Who Was Surveyed and When? The study reports results from a national sample of 5,612 eligible U.S. voters surveyed April 8–10, 2020, a moment when officials were debating mail voting, in-person safety measures, and possible changes to election administration.

What They Tested The authors embedded a randomized survey experiment that presented respondents with truthful summaries of the pandemic projections produced by two separate teams of scientists. The experiment tests whether reading those projections changed voters’ preferences over voting methods, trust in ballot counting, and support for holding the election entirely by mail.

Key Findings

• Descriptive results: about four in ten eligible voters preferred to cast their November ballot by mail rather than in person, and a majority of respondents supported policies that would expand mail voting.
• Experimental results: respondents who read the scientific projections were more likely to prefer voting by mail, more likely to trust that a mail ballot would be counted accurately, and more likely to favor conducting the election entirely by mail.

Implications for Election Planning and Research These findings show that public health information can shift both voting-method preferences and trust in election procedures. The results are directly relevant for election administrators planning logistics and for policymakers weighing expansions of mail voting during public-health crises. The study demonstrates how survey experiments can illuminate how scientific communication affects public preferences about election administration.