ANN ARBOR—A University of Michigan study on voting by mail finds strong support among residents of Oregon, where voters elected Democrat Ron Wyden to the U.S. Senate last January in the nation’s first congressional election conducted entirely by mail.

In a survey of nearly 1,500 Oregon citizens, 55 percent prefer the vote-by-mail system, 17 percent favor voting in a booth and 28 percent have no preference. In addition, 79 percent believe that voting by mail is more convenient than voting at a polling place, while another 17 percent say that casting ballots by mail is as equally convenient.

“Our preliminary analysis shows that there is a substantial level of satisfaction with vote-by-mail procedures and that they do not raise concerns about undue influence or pressures to vote,” says Michael Traugott, U-M professor of communication studies and program director at the U-M Center for Political Studies.

According to the study, 99 percent of respondents who reported voting said that they marked the ballot themselves and two-thirds said that they were alone when voting. Although more than 60 percent of those marking ballots when someone else was present said that they discussed their vote with another person, 98 percent of these voters said that they were not uncomfortable in doing so and felt no pressure to vote a certain way.

“While much was made in the pre-election media of the danger of ‘ballot parties’?gatherings where people could bring their ballots and vote together?only three respondents indicated that they attended such a meeting, and 15 more said they had been asked to attend one but did not,” Traugott says.

Other results include:

• Respondents who had postage stamps in their house when they were interviewed (85 percent) were more likely to favor voting by mail, be a registered voter and vote if registered than those who did not have stamps.

• About 15 percent of respondents who said that they voted dropped off their ballots at local election sites, rather than return them by mail (reasons included convenience, running out of time for mailing them in, saving postage and knowing that it arrived safely).

• About 10 percent of votes were cast the same day ballots were received and 49 percent were cast within the first week of receipt.

Additional results of the study will be presented in San Francisco at the August conference of the American Political Science Association, with final results to be released in October in Washington, D.C.

The study is being funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation and Ralph L. Smith Foundation. Other research team members include Erik Austin, director of data archives at the U-M Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research; Steven Rosenstone, U-M professor of political science and principal investigator for the American National Election Studies; and Robert Mason, professor emeritus of statistics at Oregon State University.

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