Mail Ballots and Drop Boxes Helped Joe Biden Flip Key States in 2020

The 2020 presidential election remains unsettled for many Americans.  At their state convention, Texas Republicans adopted a resolution stating that due to “substantial election fraud” in the 2020 presidential election Joe Biden was “not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.” It is a claim widely shared among Republicans and touted by many GOP candidates in this year’s primaries. On the other side of the partisan divide, Democrats are just as eager to brand this claim as “The Big Lie” and expose its peddlers as enemies of democracy, as the January 6 hearings make clear. Both sides are hell bent on keeping the circumstances surrounding the 2020 election alive as an election issue for some time to come.

Against this heated backdrop I have examined whether the voting procedures as spelled out in each state favored one side in the 2020 presidential contest and did so to such an extent as to tip the electoral scale.  The Pandemic prompted many states to loosen the procedures governing how and when Americans would cast their votes.  Blue states generally favored relaxations of rules, especially relating to absentee (mail) voting, while red states resisted them. It does not take a cynic to suspect partisan calculations behind those efforts. Even where rules did not change, the Pandemic drove voters to take advantage of opportunities for absentee voting in record numbers. Leaving aside the question of mischief in election administration, my analysis finds that the procedures in place mattered for the outcome in 2020.  In particular, lack of signature matching of absentee (mail) ballots or mailing absentee ballots to all without prior request along with the provision of drop boxes boosted the Democratic vote in three states that Trump had carried in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  In other words, Biden’s ability to flip those states owes much to mail ballots and drop boxes.

I am grateful to the following outlets for compiling state-by-state information on election procedures in 2020: The U.S. Vote Foundation; Ballotpedia; the National Conference of State Legislatures; the Campaign Legal Center; and the U.S. Election Project. This is the list of procedures I examined (the number of states using each is in parentheses):

·      Provision of drop-boxes (40)

·      No-excuse absentee voting (35)

·      Early voting (28)

·      Same-Day registration (20)

·      No matching of signatures of absentee ballots (16)

·      Mailing absentee ballots to all registered voters (15)

·      Extending the registration deadline (9)

  My vote metric is the change of the Democratic vote percentage in a state (plus DC) between 2016 and 2020.  To begin with the most consequential rule in 2020, that is, signature verification of absentee ballots, the states that did NOT match signatures show a 4.0 percentage gain of the Biden vote over what Hillary Clinton recorded in 2016.  It is true that Biden also gained in states that matched signatures, but much less so (2.7 percentage points).  Proof of vote fraud?  None was produced in court challenges.  What is more, Bill Barr, Trump’s own Attorney-General, concluded that there was not enough evidence of fraud to affect the outcome of the 2020 election. It must also be noted that it was common practice before 2020 not to match signatures; only Pennsylvania decided to dispense with it for 2020, and its decision was upheld in court challenges. Regardless of whether some mischief was involved, it remains to be seen if the Biden boost from lack of signature matching was big enough to tip the electoral scale in states that flipped.

The next most consequential rule of the 2020 election was mailing absentee ballots to all registered voters without a prior request. It was a novelty sparked, of course, by concerns over the Covid-19 Pandemic. The 15 states that adopted this practice in 2020 did record a sizeable boost for the Democratic ticket in 2020 relative to 2016.  Biden led Trump in those states by 3.6 more percentage points than what Clinton recorded against Trump in 2016. It was what supporters of the measure hoped for and what opponents feared.  Setting aside the question of how the returned ballots were monitored, the flood of such ballots in 2020 has a benign explanation: fear of Covid-19 in personal contacts at polling stations. And again, it remains to be seen whether the contrast between states that did and did not use this practice was big enough to flip a state.

A novelty in some states but a practice already in others before 2020, the availability of drop boxes to deposit a mail ballot, helped Biden notch a gain of 3.2 percentage points.  In contrast, states that did not use drop boxes produced a smaller Democratic gain (2.9 percentage points).  As for the remaining rules examined in this study, whether extending the registration deadline, same-day registration, no-excuse absentee voting or early voting, none of them produced any net benefit for Biden (or net loss for Trump).  What remains to be seen now is (1) whether a state that flipped to the Democrats in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) used procedures that mattered, and (2) whether those effects were big enough to flip the state.

As it turned out, all those five states provided drop boxes; Michigan and Wisconsin mailed absentee ballots to all without prior request; and Pennsylvania dispensed with signature matching for absentee ballots in 2020.  To begin with Georgia, a state whose vote has been hotly challenged by Trump, the pendulum swung 5.4 percent toward the Democrats between 2016 and 2020. The effect of drop boxes (0.3%) accounts for just a tiny fraction of that gain.  With no other provision of the three to kick in, Georgia is no help for Trump. The same goes for Arizona, with a Democratic gain of 3.8% between 2016 and 2020.  The remaining three states look more promising to make a case for Trump since each of them used two of the three provisions and the Democratic vote gain was smaller. Use of drop boxes combined with mailing absentee ballots accounts for a third of the gain in Michigan.  More impressive, In Pennsylvania lack of signature matching combined with drop boxes captures almost all of it in that state (1.6 out of 1.9).  And so does mailing absentee ballots to all combined with drop boxes in Wisconsin (1.0 out of 1.4). Without Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Biden would have captured just 276 electoral votes, barely enough to win.  Mail ballots and drop boxes gave him a more comfortable victory while falling short of denying Trump a win in 2020.

Timothy Giorlando assisted with the research for this article.