A street sign for voters. (Photo by Gustavo Frazao, via Shutterstock)CA120: The 2016 General Absentee Vote Tracker is up, and over two million California voters have already returned their ballots. This year, a great deal of national attention is being paid to the rate of early voting, and politicos on both sides of the aisle are using this data to make predictions in the presidential, congressional and state contests.
Voters casting ballots in Ventura County during an earlier election. (Photo: Joseph Sohm, Shutterstock)As we enter the June primary, we have an electorate that has been seen in polling to be more energized and with a desire to vote more commonly in general elections. The last time we had anything close to this kind of engagement was during the 2008 presidential primary. Since then, we have seen a 35% growth in No Party Preference registrations and an 88% spike in the number of Permanent Absentee Voters. In total, the population of non-partisan voters who get their ballots by mail has nearly tripled.
U.S. Senate election, 2012In little more than a decade, mail-in or “absentee” voting for statewide elections quadrupled, from 4.4 percent in 1978 to 18.4 percent in 1990, reflecting in part legal changes making it easier to vote absentee. Since the 1990s, mail-in ballots have increased exponentially. In the 2008 primary, 58 percent of the voters cast mail-in ballots, the first time in a California statewide election that mail-in ballots represented more than half the vote. In primaries since then, mail-in voting has risen steadily to a remarkable 65 percent in 2012. In the November 2012 general election, mail-in ballots accounted for about 51 percent. (Above: 2012 U.S. Senate election map/Kurykh, Wikimedia))