New data from the 2014 midterm elections shows a vast majority of national voters waited 10 minutes or less to cast their ballot, while a surprising number of people who requested mail ballots either didn’t vote or returned their ballot in ways other than by mail.
In short, states have gotten better at getting voters in-and-out of the polls quickly. But with mail voting increasing in popularity, both voters and election officials still face planning challenges when it comes to absentee and mailed ballots.
The brief from the Pew Charitable Trusts comes as the nonpartisan research and public policy organization readies a comprehensive review of how each state fared during the 2014 election. That “elections performance index” is due out at the beginning of next year, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The indexes in the past have dinged Georgia. In one released in April 2014, reviewing the Peach State's performance in the 2012 presidential election compared with four years earlier, Georgia had the biggest ratings decline in the nation. Among its problems were worsening return rates from overseas ballots, increases in the number of people not voting due to disability or illness, and one of the longest wait times in the nation at 18 minutes.
But releasing this early data now, Pew provides an updated snapshot of both the expectations and the reality of voting practices across the nation.
Among their findings for the wait times facing national voters last year:
- 83 percent reported waiting less than 10 minutes
- 13 percent waited 10 to 30 minutes.
Overall, these wait times either met or were shorter than what voters anticipated:
- 92 percent of people who expected to wait less than 10 minutes to vote actually did so.
- 71 percent of those who expected to wait more than an hour waited less than 10 minutes.
Pew researchers said those expectations may have been driven in part by voters’ experiences or their memories of media coverage during the 2012 presidential election — when lines were, on average, longer than those in 2014.
“In general, states’ performance is improving,” said David J. Becker, Pew’s director of election initiatives. Regardless of how long voters expect to be waiting in less, they typically move through very quickly — something Becker said could encourage people who don’t typically vote to get out to the polls. “That is a very, very good thing,” Becker said.
Becker said researchers were surprised, however, at how many voters requested mail ballots last year but then returned them in-person to their local election office. Among the findings:
- 69 percent of mail voters across the nation returned their ballots via the U.S. Postal Service.
- 29 percent returned them in person to an official election location such as a polling place, early voting center, or drop box.
- 85 percent returned their ballots themselves, and 14 percent gave their ballots to someone else to mail or drop off for them.
Given that nearly three in 10 voters returned mail ballots — and that all voting is done by mail in states such as Washington and Oregon, and state such as Arizona and Colorado allow voters to register as permanent mail voters — Becker said election officials need to have the physical infrastructure in place to accept ballots handed in in-person. A drop-off location, for example, must be staffed and available to accept the ballots, he said.
The findings resulted from a series of surveys the Pew Research Center and Abt SRBI conducted with a group of randomly selected U.S. adults throughout 2014, both before and after the midterm election.
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