Half Of Americans Voting In Person Say They Don't Trust Voting By Mail
Half of all voters who plan to vote in person in the upcoming presidential election are doing so at least in part because they don’t trust voting by mail, a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll finds.
Overall, just over 60% of those who plan to vote in the upcoming presidential election say they will do so in person, either on Election Day (41%) or at an early voting location (21%). Of those who’ve already voted, 13% say they did so in person.
The poll is one of several to show that the share of people planning to vote by mail has dropped significantly since the spring. In a recent NPR/Marist poll, 48% of likely voters said they planned to cast ballots in person on Election Day and another 14% said they would vote in person at an early voting location.
Mistrust in voting by mail is more pronounced among Republicans in the HuffPost/YouGov survey, possibly because President Donald Trump has spent the summer claiming, falsely, that mail-in votes will be used to steal the election. But notably, a large share of Democrats who plan to vote in person also cite a lack of trust in the mail: 39% of Democrats versus 61% of Republicans are planning to cast their ballots in person.
The numbers challenge earlier predictions that the coronavirus pandemic would result in a tidal shift to voting by mail. More Americans — about three in four — are eligible to vote absentee than at any time in the country’s history, and in some primaries held this spring, voters casting absentee ballots outnumbered in-person voters by nearly two to one.
But a massive shift to in-person voting could spell chaos for many precincts on Election Day.
“If a voter received an absentee ballot already, that’s someone the election official has not taken into account when doing resource allocation for how many workers to hire, booths to provide, ballots to print,” said Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund.
Space constraints from social distancing guidelines,...
