Rutgers scholar Katherine Ognyanova is available to comment on the latest Rutgers-Harvard-Northeastern-Northwestern survey data on attitudes about mail-in voting, from The COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States.
The researchers surveyed 19,052 people across all 50 states plus the District of Columbia from July 10 to July 26. The researchers polled participants on support for voting by mail, and likelihood to vote by absentee or mail-in ballot this November.
To view the full report and findings, click here.
- Sixty-four percent of likely voters currently support making it easier to vote by mail, and 23% oppose the idea.
- Sixty-six percent of likely voters support giving every American the right to vote by mail in November, and 22% oppose the idea.
- In New York State, 63% of respondents said they are likely to vote by mail in 2020 – a significant increase from 2016, when only 5% of New Yorkers voted by mail.
- In New Jersey, 70% of respondents said they are likely to vote by mail in 2020 – a significant increase from 2016, when 5% of New Jerseyans voted by mail.
- Forty-one percent of Americans said they were “very likely” and 23% said they were “somewhat likely” to vote by mail in November. As a point of comparison, 21% of votes nationwide were cast by mail in 2018, which was a historic high.
Katherine Ognyanova is an assistant professor at Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information. She does research in the areas of network science, computational social science, social technology, media, civic, and political communication.
Additional collaborators on the report include: David Lazer, Alexi Quintana, Matthew Simonson and Hanyu Chwe of Northeastern University; Matthew A. Baum and John Della Volpe of Harvard University; James Druckman of Northwestern University; Roy H. Perlis and Mauricio Santillana of Harvard Medical School
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