Abstract Several U.S. states expanded vote-by-mail in 2020, while other states made no changes. This uneven expansion occurred in a highly racialized policy context. We explore how the United States’ history of race-based disenfranchisement, racialized elite rhetoric, and the uneven policy expansion interact to shape voting methods and trust in government across racial groups. Using data from three national surveys and coarsened exact matching, we compare the behavior of voters across adopting and non-adopting states. We find that adopting no-excuse absentee voting and universal vote-by-mail in 2020 is associated with increased mail voting across racial groups, despite Black Americans’ historically rooted mistrust in new forms of voting. We also find that expanding mail voting was associated with increases in government trust in some cases. While prior work finds modest short-term increases in turnout, vote-by-mail may also affect perceptions of government, which can help close racial turnout gaps in the long term.
Martinez et al. (Tue,) studied this question.