No Stupid Questions

Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump urged his voters to vote in person while Democrats promoted voting by mail due to Covid pandemic. Steve Bannon was secretly recorded saying that this was the Trump Campaign's plan to falsely claim the election was stolen. Steve Bannon does not deny saying this. By law, votes can't be tallied until polls close. Mail in ballots take longer to process because envelopes have to be opened, info needs to be verified then the vote can be counted. In person ballot results are faster because verification has already taken place and in many places ballots are scanned waiting to counted by a machine. Of course this is how it went down.

So to answer your question, Republican voters have a distrust for mail in voting. Largely because a president of the United States told his supporters to vote in person. During a pandemic.

You've gotten some good answers already so I'm going to comment on something unrelated, mostly because I've had a couple glasses of wine and for some reason found this hysterical.

I've googled with a few search engines....

I'm old enough to remember search before Google, the rise of Google and the verbification of Google's name to become a term to meaning to search with Google. To see it now used in this way is deeply funny to me for some reason. Incredible to see how language evolves over time.

It's just covid, before covid mail votes were proportional, then voting by mail was encouraged to avoid spreading covid. That made the number of Democrats voting by mail go up and the number of Republicans go down out of spite. Republican politicians just followed the reflex of Republican voters to resent prosocial behavior and tried to make use of it.

voting favours dems. Easier voting favours voting.

Its kinda funny because its actually older folk that actually need it. When available though I think left folk like it. I likenot having to write myself a cheat sheet and can just fill out the ballot while I research the canidates.

Maga still hasn’t figured out how to lick a stamp.

The more people that vote, the more people vote democrat. republicans are doing literally everything they can to disenfranchise voters, because it's the only way they can win elections. I mean, they stole the last presidential election after failing to do it the previous time. I'm not so sure we'll have an election in 2028, the pipeline of "sending untrained militia into the streets hoping to spark an incident that allows them an excuse to invoke martial law and cancel elections" is running very smoothly.

People who vote dem are people with more interesting things to do than stand in line for hours.

Because democrat voters out number Republican voters. If you increase the votes you increase the democrat votes by nature of increasing the number of votes collected. This isn’t factoring secondaries like demographics.

Cities tend to be more democratic than their surrounding area, but also tend to be more densely populated. So you can have a situation like this with hours long lines in busy areas, which heavily disrupt people's ability to have their vote registered.

So! The answer to that problem is mail-in voting! Vote in advance, with no lines, on your schedule! But the problem with city voting isn't always an accident, and so mail-in voting has obviously got to go too.

But anyway, I think that's your answer. It swings Democrat because other things have already happened to make voting in Democrat areas worse in other ways, and this seemed like a good alternative.

Work.

Working people can't take off time to vote. Poor people can't take off time to vote. Students, teachers, can't take off time to vote. So in-person voting favors retirees, wealthy people, and business owners like farmers who can set their own hours.

When you can control where the polling locations are, you can drastically under serve areas that don't vote republican. This discourages or even makes completely impossible voting in some areas. I live in a wealthy republican suburb. In the last 25 years there has never been much of a line to vote at any time of day. I can usually get in, vote, and be out in 15 minutes. Within a 20 minute drive of me, there are polling locations that have lines which take many hours to get through. Many people have to take time off of work, or leave their kids home alone to vote. Some people can't stand in line for that long due to health issues.

While mail in voting enables traveling businessmen, college students, military, the elderly and sick to vote - which probably doesn't overly favor either party - it does disrupt the polling location engineering which is intentionally designed to favor one party over the other.

It doesn’t. Florida is an example.

Anything that increases access to polls helps Dems because people like their policies more than the cruelty at the heart of fascism

States with Republican control also have weird rules limiting number of polling places. Sometimes it's like "1 polling location per county" where a rural county of 5,000 does just fine with 1 polling location. But then a city with millions of people also gets 1. The goal is to create lines around the block in cities, where people will simply give up rather than vote. Cities favor Democrats, so Republicans try to limit voter turnout in cities.

Voting by mail completely eliminates these artificial hurdles.

America is a hovel where there are few rights for workers. They literally can’t afford to take time off work to vote, and Republicans make it as hard as possible for them to vote in person, by removing transport options, and closing polls at ridiculously early times. Most Republican controlled states close polls at 7pm.

Access to voting is the foundation of democracy. Sane systems try to minimize any "pressure" to not vote, for any reason, because any such pressure is very likely to hit some demographics harder than others. The Republicans in particular rather blatantly rely on weaponizing this as a way of subverting democratic principles, by making it disproportionately hard to vote if you're working, or poor, or young, or a minority of pretty much any kind.

Therefore, anything that increases access to voting, and levels the playing field, is worse for the GOP than being able to keep up the status quo of voter suppression. Hence their extremely shrill opposition to mail, and also the ("hilarious") claims of "fraud" - painting the picture of your democracy being subverted is a handy talking point while you're busy subverting your democracy.

So the boring answer is that your question is sort of back-to-front: it's not that the mail ballots are skewed as such, it's that access to in-person voting is. Mail ballots favor the Democrats because it is their voter base that's (in this case, anyway) being suppressed.

Until very recently, Republicans had an edge in mail-in voting, however after Trump started deriding it, a not small number of Republican voters stopped using it.

Also skewing the numbers is that Democratic-led states largely allow everyone to vote by mail if they'd like, whereas Republican-led states strictly limit mail-in voting to people who meet certain criteria. This means that Democrats are overrepresented when you look at a national count. Oregon and Washington don't even have in-person voting, only vote by mail. Republican-led states limiting mail-in voting predates Trump though, because they try to limit anything they can related to voting.

Postal voting is primarily employed by people who work full-time, have access to regular mail service, are younger, and have some amount of trust in government services.

Contrast with Republican mainstays: the well-to-do, rural areas, the elderly, and those who distrust the government.

Also it's self-reinforcing: the more Republican pundits link postal voting and fraud in their audience's minds, the less likely their voters are to use it, increasing the chance that depressing it will primarily harm opposition voters.

In addition to the reasons given by others, it's because Republicans are eugenicists who think people should have been and should continue to be left to die if they get sick. Mail-in voting was expanded during covid to make it more accessible, and they (in media) seized on the opportunity to drive a wedge between people and create doubt in the democratic system. If your goal is authoritarianism, any small step to reduce faith in electoral systems is a win because it gives you an excuse to take control outside of elections.

I've wondered this too. My only guess is if you mess with US Mail there are strict federal laws that protect it. Plus it gives time to read, research and discuss what you're voting for. LOL, oh and my wife tells me who to vote for.

Can't speak for the ballot boxes but there always seems to be some stories about missing ballots. Or people waiting out side for hours in November.