The American Political Science Association

Abstract

Draft: Please do not cite without permission of the authors, In a widely cited result, Southwell and Burchett report that Oregon’s much noted innovation of fully vote by mail elections increased turnout by 10%. In this paper, we attempt to replicate this finding; extend the analysis to additional years in order to test whether the estimated effect is due to “novelty ” effects of the first three voting by mail elections; and broaden the geographic scope of the study to include Washington state (a unique that has adopted voting by mail county by county over a decade long period). When relying on the analytical techniques suggested by the original authors, we find no discernible impact of voting by mail on turnout, although we can replicate their results using an alterative methodology. Extending the time series to include ten additional years of voting by mail elections decreases the size of the estimated impact substantially. We conclude that any findings of increased turnout in Oregon due to voting by mail is a result of the novelty of the new voting method and the unique circumstances surrounding the first three vote by mail elections. However, we do find a discernible impact of voting by mail on turnout in Washington state.

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