Curing the Vote: Who Corrects Their Rejected Mail Ballots?

• In Event: Do Electoral Systems Ask Too Much of Voters?

Abstract

As vote-by-mail (VBM) ballots become increasingly common in the United States, the importance of ballot rejection will rise in prominence. VBM ballot rejections can be the result of signature deficiencies on mail ballot return envelopes or lateness, where the latter characterizes a ballot received by elections officials after a statutory deadline. The risk of both of these problems is unique to VBM ballots, and, to place the scale of VBM ballot rejection in context, over half-a-million VBM ballots were rejected in both the 2020 United States general election and the subsequent 2022 midterm election. Rejected mail ballots lead to lost opportunities to vote, and with this in mind half of the states in the country offer voters the opportunity to “cure” rejected mail ballots of signature deficiencies. While late mail ballots are uncurable, mail ballots cured of signature deficiencies that would otherwise have been rejected are counted as valid votes. Analyzing records of millions of individual mail ballots cast in Florida and Washington over several election cycles, we examine the types of voters who, upon learning their mail ballots were rejected, seek to cure them. We consider whether there are timing issues, demographic characteristics, or partisan dimensions in ballot curing, and in so doing we investigate whether ballot curing has temporal, racial/ethnic, age, or partisan biases. Our results have implications for public ballot curing policies not only in the United States but also in other countries that continue to expand the use of “postal” or other modalities of advance voting.

Authors

• Michael C. Herron, Dartmouth College

• Daniel A. Smith, University of Florida