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The reasons are unclear: a patchy postal service or racism?

A RECORD NUMBER of Americans are expected to vote by mail in this year’s presidential election. That is due, in no small part, to the covid-19 pandemic, but it is also the result of a long-term shift toward early and absentee voting. Activists argue that increasing access to such alternative forms of voting helps to make voting more convenient—eg, by removing the need to stand in a long queue at the polling station, or to spend hours away from work and family. According to Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, voters have already returned nearly 500,000 ballots nationwide for the November elections. (Remarkably, most of those cast so far have come from just two states, North Carolina and Virginia.)

But election officials do not always count all the absentee ballots that are cast. States have established a system of laws requiring voters to follow certain procedures—such as affixing their signatures to ballot envelopes—in order for their votes to be counted. Ballots deemed to be in violation of these rules are thrown out, no matter how trivial the mistake.

You might assume that such violations occur randomly. But data from the 2016 election suggest that state election officials are much more likely to reject the ballots of black and Hispanic voters. According to research by Merlin Heidemanns, a political scientist at Columbia University, in 2016 non-white voters accounted for a disproportionately large share of rejected ballots in nearly every state (several were excluded from the analysis because they don’t provide sufficient data). Indeed, Mr Heidemanns estimates that black voters cast only 10% of absentee ballots, but 18% of rejected ones. For Hispanics, the disparity was starker still. They accounted for 12% of absentee votes and 36% of rejections (see chart). On the other hand, white voters made up a vastly smaller share of rejected absentee votes (22%) than their share of submitted ballots (77%) would predict.

Election-watchers have a few theories, though no firm answers, for why this racial disparity exists. One is that mail service is worse in minority neighbourhoods, which could lead to ballots arriving too late to be included. Another is that poor voters are less likely to affix stamps to their ballots. It is an easy mistake to make: the rules about whether stamps are needed, which can vary wildly even within states, are often unclear. A more nefarious possibility is that poll workers may reject non-white ballots at higher rates. Since ballot-counters often see voters’ surnames, and some even receive explicit data on their race, their own biases may lead them to disenfranchise them—knowingly or not.

Whatever the cause, the racial disparities in absentee-ballot rejections are but one of the many factors that make this year’s elections hard to predict.

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