{"id":9759,"date":"2020-10-13T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2020-10-13T17:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/%year%\/%monthnum%\/%day%\/mail-in-voting-became-much-more-common-in-2020-primaries-as-covid-19-spread\/"},"modified":"2024-04-13T23:44:59","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T04:44:59","slug":"mail-in-voting-became-much-more-common-in-2020-primaries-as-covid-19-spread","status":"publish","type":"short-read","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2020\/10\/13\/mail-in-voting-became-much-more-common-in-2020-primaries-as-covid-19-spread\/","title":{"rendered":"Mail-in voting became much more common in 2020 primaries as COVID-19 spread"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"A<\/a>
A sign outside the Charlotte, Vermont, Town Hall on Aug. 10, 2020. (Robert Nickelsberg\/Getty Images)\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mail-in voting \u2013 often called absentee voting or vote-by-mail \u2013 has slowly but steadily gained in popularity<\/a> in the United States. And it received a big boost this year as primary season ran head-on into the novel coronavirus pandemic<\/a>. Mail-in ballots accounted for just over half of this year\u2019s primary votes cast in the 37 states (plus the District of Columbia) for which data is available. That was roughly double the mail-in share of the vote in those same jurisdictions in the 2018 and 2016 general elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In all, 26.6 million mail-in votes were cast in the 49 presidential, state and combined primaries that the Center examined for 2020, out of nearly 53 million total votes. (Some states held stand-alone presidential primaries and their regular state primaries at a later date; others combined them all on a single date.) The actual totals are almost certainly bigger, since some of the states for which detailed data isn\u2019t available \u2013 including Colorado<\/a>, Arizona<\/a> and Montana<\/a> \u2013 historically have had high rates of mail-in voting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

How we did this<\/div>