On vote by mail in rural Nebraska, across the partisan divide

Will Norris wrote this week for Washington Monthly under the headline, "The Rural Republicans Who Ignored Trump and Voted by Mail."   The subhead is "Exclusive: A new study further undermines the former president’s lies about mail ballots."

Here's an excerpt: 

Emerson, Nebraska, is a farming town of 900 in the state’s sparse northeast expanse. Its Republican-leaning, nearly all-white population makes Emerson not unlike dozens of other rural communities in the state. It is unique, however, for being the only town in the state divided between three counties: Dixon County, which covers the western half of Emerson; and Dakota and Thurston Counties, which make up the northeastern and southeastern quadrants of the town, respectively.

Those odd lines made Emerson a litmus test for one of the most contentious issues in the 2020 election: vote by mail. Under state law, Nebraska counties with fewer than 10,000 residents have the option to conduct their elections entirely by mail by sending ballots to all registered voters. Dixon County chose to do so. Dakota and Thurston Counties decided otherwise and ran their elections the old-fashioned way, with polling places.

Donald Trump had warned in 2020 that mailing every voter a ballot would lead to massive fraud and undermine the Republican Party’s electoral chances. Political scientists, by contrast, had concluded that vote by mail had little, if any, effect on turnout. The citizens of Emerson, however, didn’t get the memos—or perhaps ignored them. Not only did voting in the town go off without a hint of fraud, but turnout on the all-mail Dixon County half of Emerson was 8.3 percent higher than on the other side of town, according to a new study by the National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI), a nonprofit research organization.

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Nebraska was one of only two states in 2020, along with North Dakota, in which counties had the choice to run all-mail elections for offices up and down the ballot, including the presidency. That made it a natural experiment for [Amelia] Showalter [the lead researcher] to test the impact of vote by mail.

A California study also "found that states which mailed a ballot to every registered voter in 2020’s presidential election saw voter turnout increase by an average of 5.6 percent, with no clear advantage to either political party."

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