Barber Michael, Holbein John B
Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University, 745 Kimball Tower, Provo, UT 84602, USA.
Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia, 111 Garrett Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.
Sci Adv. 2020 Aug 26;6(35):eabc7685. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abc7685. eCollection 2020 Aug.
Recently, mandatory vote-by-mail has received a great deal of attention as a means of administering elections in the United States. However, policy-makers disagree on the merits of this approach. Many of these debates hinge on whether mandatory vote-by-mail advantages one political party over the other. Using a unique pairing of historical county-level data that covers the past three decades and more than 40 million voting records from the two states that have conducted a staggered rollout of mandatory vote-by-mail (Washington and Utah), we use several methods for causal inference to show that mandatory vote-by-mail slightly increases voter turnout but has no effect on election outcomes at various levels of government. Our results find meaning given contemporary debates about the merits of mandatory vote-by-mail. Mandatory vote-by-mail ensures that citizens are given a safe means of casting their ballot while simultaneously not advantaging one political party over the other.
最近，强制邮寄投票作为美国进行选举的一种方式受到了广泛关注。然而，政策制定者们对这种方式的优点存在分歧。其中许多争论都取决于强制邮寄投票是否使一个政党比另一个政党更具优势。利用涵盖过去三十年的独特历史县级数据配对以及来自两个已逐步推行强制邮寄投票的州（华盛顿州和犹他州）的4000多万条投票记录，我们使用了几种因果推断方法来表明，强制邮寄投票略微提高了选民投票率，但对各级政府的选举结果没有影响。鉴于当前关于强制邮寄投票优点的争论，我们的结果具有重要意义。强制邮寄投票确保公民有安全的投票方式，同时不会使一个政党比另一个政党更具优势。
