I hate to burst anyone’s bubble — well, actually, I don’t mind, because some bubbles do need bursting.
Some on the right are celebrating, and some on the left are groaning, after the U.S. Supreme Court this week seemed to take a dim view of states — such as Virginia — that allow mail ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day.
This may be a great principle to those on both sides, just in different ways, but here’s some inconvenient math: There aren’t really enough of these ballots to matter.
In theory, they could in a very close election, of course, and those on each side can hold to their principles that either a) counting these post-election ballots feels very sketchy (the conservative view) or b) disallowing them feels like disenfranchising some voters (the liberal view).
Then there’s this numerical view:
In last year’s governor’s race, Virginia saw 3,433,340 votes cast in the governor’s race, more than ever before.
Of those, 29,794 were mail ballots that were mailed before the deadline on Election Day but didn’t arrive until after the election. That’s 0.8% of the total.
Those who find this practice offensive would prefer the number to be 0.00%, but in practical terms, that 0.8% did not come anywhere close to making a difference. That small number ought to be reassuring to both sides: For conservatives who don’t like post-election ballots, they don’t matter in the big scheme of things; for liberals who worry that the Supreme Court is about to outlaw this practice, well, these votes don’t seem to matter in the big scheme of things. This legal fight is more about principle than practice, but the impact either way seems pretty negligible.
The closest House of Delegates race in Virginia last fall was in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, where Republican incumbent Tony Wilt held off a stiff challenge by Democrat Andrew Payton in House District 34.
That race saw 28,927 votes cast. Of those, 90 were post-election ballots — 0.3%, lower than the statewide percentage.
Here’s where some politics do come in: Those who cast mail ballots are overwhelmingly Democratic, so these late-arriving ballots (which aren’t really late-arriving, they’re still on time) do skew quite blue. In that Wilt-Payton race, those 90 post-election ballots broke 69 for Payton, 21 for Wilt. That was a pickup for Payton of 48 votes — but it didn’t make a difference even in the closest race in the state. Wilt still won by 257 votes.
I can’t rule out that there’s some local race in Virginia where post-election mail ballots have made the difference, but they haven’t in any statewide or legislative election. If someone knows of a local election where they’d have, please let me know.
Allowing mail ballots to be counted as long as they’re postmarked in time, even if they arrive after Election Day, isn’t necessarily a liberal idea: The state at the center of the Supreme Court argument is Mississippi, which probably hasn’t done anything liberal in quite some time. Texas is another.
Virginia law allows for properly postmarked mail ballots if they arrive by noon on the Friday after Election Day, although a bill pending before Gov. Abigail Spanberger would extend that to 5 p.m. California allows a week. Alaska and Maryland allow up to 10 days. (Plus Guam and the Virgin Islands. How slow is the mail on Guam and the Virgin Islands?) Illinois allows up to 14 days. (You can find a full list here.)
The philosophical reason for allowing these ballots is the same as your tax return: The law doesn’t require the Internal Revenue Service to have your tax return in hand by April 15, just that you have to mail it by then. Why should we treat elections differently?
That’s balanced against history and some of the darker impulses of human nature to cheat: the 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas, where at first Lyndon Johnson appeared to have lost narrowly but then won when 202 votes were mysteriously “discovered” in one county. Those votes were in a box, not a mailbox, but the fear remains the same. We’re accustomed to election nights providing finality to an election, and so having a question mark remain for several days makes some people queasy — and suspicious.
This legal battle of counting deadlines on mail ballots is really just a byproduct of the expansion of voting by mail. In Virginia, we’ve now had mail voting for five years, starting in 2021. Over those five years, the percentage of Virginians who vote by mail has been remarkably consistent — from a low of 9.9% in the 2022 midterms to a high of 11.1% in both the 2023 legislative and local elections and the 2024 presidential and congressional elections.
When 1 in 10 voters prefer to mail in their ballots, that’s not an insignificant number. Now, remember what I said about how Democrats prefer mail voting? Here are the numbers.
Last fall, 14.2% of the voters in bright blue Fairfax County voted by mail. In Alexandria, 13.5% did. In Arlington County, 12.9%.
However, in the strongest Republican localities in the state — in Southwest Virginia — mail voting barely registered. In Scott County, 3.9% of the ballots were cast by mail. In Lee County, just 4.1%. In Buchanan and Russell counties, 4.5%.
Perhaps some Republicans think that if they could restrict or even abolish mail voting (as President Donald Trump would like to do, even though he votes by mail), they could depress the Democratic vote somewhat. Maybe so, but that’s actually not in the party’s best interests. The party that needs mail voting most is the Republican Party.
The counties with the lowest turnout are traditionally Republican counties — and not just any Republican counties, but the strongest ones in the state. These are also the counties with the lowest percentage of voters voting by mail. If Republicans want to be competitive in Virginia, they may need better candidates and better campaign messages — but they definitely need better turnout from their strongest counties. One easy way to do that (well, easy in theory) is to persuade more people to vote by mail.
Let’s look at some numbers. (Yes, I love numbers.)
Last year in Scott County, 83% of the voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, and that was actually on the low side. In the lieutenant governor’s race, the Republican percentage rose to 84.14% and hit 85.77% in the attorney general’s race.
However, only 45.8% of the county’s voters bothered to take part in the election. That was below the state average of 54.9%, which was pulled up by some Democratic-voting places such as Albemarle County, where 66.2% voted.
Scott County, as we’ve seen, also had the state’s lowest figures on mail-in ballots.
Scott County didn’t even have the lowest overall turnout in the state. That was in Buchanan County, where voter turnout was just 37.8% in a county that voted 81.91% to 83.98% for candidates on the Republican ticket. If a party has a locality where they know they can run up a score of 80% or more, they need to maximize their vote there, and Republicans aren’t. Here’s one way to look at how inefficient Republicans are with their base in Southwest Virginia. Bright red Buchanan County is slightly bigger than bright blue Falls Church. In Falls Church last fall, though, the voter turnout was 64.5% to Buchanan’s 37.8%. In practical terms, 7,600 people cast ballots in Falls Church while only 5,413 did in Buchanan. Put another way, Falls Church delivered 6,407 votes for Abigail Spanberger while Buchanan contributed 4,434 to to Winsome Earle-Sears’ tally. If people in Buchanan County voted at the same rate as those in Falls Church, Buchanan could have delivered about 2,000 more votes to the Republican cause. That wouldn’t have been enough to change the outcome, but the point is that Republicans are leaving a lot of votes uncast in Southwest Virginia.
If Republicans want to win more statewide elections, they somehow need to persuade more rural voters — especially in Southwest Virginia — to start voting. The ease of mail voting would seem to be one way to do that. In Falls Church last year 867 people voted by mail, 800 of them for Spanberger, a share of 92.2%. In Buchanan County, just 244 people voted by mail, 48.7% for Spanberger in a county where overall she could only muster 17.9%. What that tells me is that Republicans are reluctant to vote by mail, which is their right, but that because so few people in Buchanan County vote anyway, Republicans would be wise to invest in a vote-by-mail push to increase turnout.
If the U.S. Supreme Court eventually nixes counting mail ballots that arrive after the deadline, Republicans can claim a victory in principle, but Democrats won’t have lost anything in practice. If Republicans want to claim more victories at the ballot box in Virginia, though, they need more mail voting. Just make sure those ballots get there on time.
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