Implementing the mail ballot: gauging voter preferences using a discrete choice experiment

Voting by mail is becoming increasingly popular. Recent research has highlighted the great variety of mail ballots, suggesting a lack of best practices for designing mail ballots. Focusing on the tension between the simplicity and security of the mail ballot, where adding more security features tends to run the risk of making voting by mail more difficult, this paper argues that it is a value judgment whether the design of mail ballots should err on the side of simplicity or on the side of security, a value judgment that should be informed by public preferences. To this end, we conduct a discrete choice experiment with a nationally representative sample of German voters to understand which mail ballot features voters prefer. The results suggest that even after being primed with security considerations, voters frequently opt for a simpler rather than a more secure mail ballot.