In 2020, as the country voted in and then sweated out a razor-thin presidential election, the voters of Clay County in rural south-central Nebraska participated in numbers never seen in this century.
The number of potential voters living in the county had barely budged since 2016. And yet, during the 2020 election, some 507 more voters cast ballots than had in 2016 – a 16% spike.
In total, some 84% of Clay County’s 4,271 registered voters cast ballots, far higher than Nebraska’s statewide turnout and the country’s.
So what changed in 2020?
For the first time, Clay County’s registered voters all automatically received a ballot in the mail. They then could either mail it back, or slide it in the drop box in the courthouse parking lot.
Clay County is far from alone, a Flatwater Free Press analysis shows. Eleven Nebraska counties are now showing consistently higher voter turnout after switching to all-mail voting – a change allowed by state law only in rural counties with fewer than 10,000 residents.
On average, 16% more voters cast a general election ballot in those all-mail counties in 2020 than did in 2016, when most went to a polling place. Participation also tended to jump in lower turnout elections like midterms, the analysis of voting data shows – even when overall statewide turnout fell as it did in 2022.
These jumps occurred in these 11 rural Nebraska counties, where 79% of voters picked Donald Trump over Joe Biden, even as Trump himself repeatedly attacked mail voting – baselessly, election experts say – as being rife with fraud.
Trump’s campaign against mail voting, which he’s tempered as he again runs for president, has roused at least a few of those counties’ residents, who have complained to their county clerks. And in at least one county, there’s been an unsuccessful effort to get rid of all-mail voting.
But generally, county clerks who administer all-mail voting, like Clay County's Cassie Aksamit, told the Flatwater Free Press that this voting method makes sense for their counties.
“You're gonna have people that don't like (mail-in voting). You're gonna have people that think it's the greatest thing ever. You have convenience reasons. But then you have people that enjoy the ability to go to a polling location,” said Aksamit.
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Large-scale vote by mail dates all the way back to soldiers voting absentee during the Civil War.
But more and more Americans have chosen to mail in their ballots in recent decades, especially as they become more comfortable with voting by mail, says Ben Hovland, chair of the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency dedicated to election administration. Then the practice was supercharged by a global pandemic, as some Americans shied away from congregating in public places. In Omaha, Lincoln and across Nebraska, voters have the right to request a mail-in ballot.
But all-mail voting – closing polling places and simply sending a mail ballot to every registered voter – had quietly come to Nebraska long before the pandemic. It started in individual precincts and spread to entire counties, thanks to a 2005 law introduced by a then-freshman Republican state senator named Deb Fischer.
Fischer, now a U.S. senator, said she sponsored the bill to save voters time and counties money.
"I think it's going to be a money saver in many of the sparsely populated counties that I represent,” she told the Omaha World-Herald in 2005.
Cherry County, Fischer’s home county and the biggest, most remote county in Nebraska, quickly turned three-quarters of its precincts into voting by mail by 2006.
It was the first time that the 25 registered voters in a 150-square-mile precinct didn’t have to travel to a two-car garage on a family ranch doubling up as a polling site, the Associated Press reported.
Then-Secretary of State John Gale said at the time that the bill helped the state’s least populous counties now that they had to follow federal accessibility laws for disabled people.
Many of these 11 counties moved to all-mail in stages after seeing initial success from early participating precincts.
Stanton County initially stopped using some rural school buildings in the southern part of the county that didn’t meet accessibility requirements. Then in 2014, Pilger lost its polling sites after a tornado demolished much of the town.
Stanton County precincts that didn’t vote by all-mail consistently trailed its all-mail precincts in data provided by Stanton County Clerk Wanda Heermann’s office. So the whole county eventually switched, with turnout spiking each time a precinct changed to all-mail voting.
All-mail voting also eased the problem of finding poll workers in rural counties, clerks said.
With the new voter ID requirements, Aksamit says, Clay County today would probably need seven or eight poll workers in each polling place if they still existed. Countywide that’s close to 80 workers, whose party affiliations, by state law, are supposed to reflect how votes were distributed in the previous election. But with mail-in voting, the process is much simpler, and it saves money, she said.
Rural county clerks have also noticed a big jump in younger voters participating since they switched to all-mail. Bound by work and child care, young adults often don’t feel they have time to go vote, said Knox County Clerk Joann Fischer.
"Those (young adults who voted) were like, nonexistent before. Now, we're seeing a bigger number there," she said.
Overall, the data is clear, said Steve Smith, spokesperson for Civic Nebraska, a nonprofit promoting civic engagement. The ease of receiving a ballot automatically and not having to travel to a polling place is spurring more participation – particularly among registered voters who had rarely before voted.
In this year’s primaries, voter turnout was lower than anticipated. But in all-mail counties, voting was “business as usual,” Smith said.
“Those numbers look closer to a general election turnout than we did a primary election turnout,” he said.
This increased participation doesn’t come without opposition.
Sherri Bacon, who lives a mile outside of Valentine, led a group of residents and requested that Cherry County revert to the hybrid model prior to 2020.
In an interview with Flatwater, Bacon questioned if higher voter turnout is actually a goal Nebraska should be pursuing. “Is more always better?” she asked.
Bacon’s ex-husband’s brother had never voted before he received a ballot in the mail in 2022, she said, but decided to “mark in some ovals, put it in the envelope and send it back in.”
“That's not informed voting in our opinion,” Bacon said.
Voters are more deliberate when they have to be present at the polls, she said.
Cherry County Clerk Brittny Longcor disagrees. Aside from believing that increased turnout is an inherently good thing, Longcor told the Flatwater Free Press that it has helped keep county voter rolls up-to-date, as required by state law.
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Earlier this year, 300,000 voters targeted by the Nebraska Democratic Party received a mailer. Inside was a vote-by-mail application form. The message shown next to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris: “When Democrats vote by mail, we win elections.”
Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, designed the poster. She wants her voter base to vote by mail.
“(In) our state legislative races, where we invest heavily in vote by mail … we just think our vote-by-mail program is usually the margin of victory,” Kleeb said.
Kleeb sees the option to conduct all voting by mail as an “unfair advantage” for these 11 counties that are largely rural and heavily Republican.
“Could you imagine if we had all mail-in voting in Douglas and Lancaster County?” Kleeb said.
There is an exception to the population rule. All of Nebraska’s 93 counties, including Douglas and Lancaster, can and often do utilize all-mail voting in special elections involving local candidates or ballot measures.
Some Republicans, especially Trump, have been critical of mail-in voting. But elderly, rural electorates who tend to benefit from mail-in voting, also represent an electoral stronghold for the Republican Party, said John Hibbing, a retired University of Nebraska–Lincoln political science professor.
“I think they've no longer been quite as critical of mail-in voting as they have been in the past, partly for electoral reasons, and perhaps partly because they realize that there just is no evidence that there's fraud,” said Hibbing.
Angie Eberspacher, communications director for the Nebraska Republican Party, didn’t reply to Flatwater Free Press’ request for an interview.
Sixty-seven Nebraska counties meet the population threshold to conduct all-mail elections, but only 11 actually do. Eight additional counties have at least one vote-by-mail precinct.
No counties have requested to switch to all-mail voting since the 2020 election, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
“Many Nebraskans still prefer to vote at the polls, and I will keep the polls open,” Secretary of State Bob Evnen said in an email statement.
Eight states now conduct elections by mail by default, including Oregon, which leads the country in voter turnout, and Colorado, which also utilizes voting centers for in-person voting.
Offering both in-person and mail-in options serves voters well, but it’s up to local election administrators to decide if they can afford to do so, says Hovland with the Election Assistance Commission. Whether running an entirely mail-in election is cheaper than an in-person election largely depends on the jurisdiction.
But one type of election is particularly expensive to run: those in which both in-person and mail-in voting command sizable shares and election administrators have to effectively enforce two sets of rules.
Hovland doesn’t think election administration affects voter turnout in high-interest races, though the differences in these 11 Nebraska counties are worth studying, he said. But voting by mail might play a bigger role in low-turnout elections, in which voters might not remember to vote.
In 2022, the second time Clay County residents voted entirely by mail, the county’s voters again participated at a higher rate than they had in the previous midterm election, even though statewide turnout dropped. Aksamit, the county clerk, anticipates this high turnout level will continue.
The increased turnout in all-mail counties has Hibbing scratching his head. Political science research generally suggests that voting by mail has very little effect on participation, he said.
“We will have to wait and see whether the change is lasting or a one-off thing that diminishes once the novelty wears off,” Hibbing said.
Reporter Natalia Alamdari contributed to this story.
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