Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 9, 2025

Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation of the Posterior Medial Frontal Cortex to Experimentally Reduce Ideological Threat Responses
Published on: September 28, 2018
The participatory and partisan impacts of mandatory vote-by-mail
Michael Barber1, John B Holbein2
1Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University, 745 Kimball Tower, Provo, UT 84602, USA.
Abstract:
Recently, mandatory vote-by-mail has received a great deal of attention as a means of administering elections in the United States. However, policy-makers disagree on the merits of this approach. Many of these debates hinge on whether mandatory vote-by-mail advantages one political party over the other. Using a unique pairing of historical county-level data that covers the past three decades and more than 40 million voting records from the two states that have conducted a staggered rollout of mandatory vote-by-mail (Washington and Utah), we use several methods for causal inference to show that mandatory vote-by-mail slightly increases voter turnout but has no effect on election outcomes at various levels of government. Our results find meaning given contemporary debates about the merits of mandatory vote-by-mail. Mandatory vote-by-mail ensures that citizens are given a safe means of casting their ballot while simultaneously not advantaging one political party over the other.
More Related Videos
09:40Measuring Neural and Behavioral Activity During Ongoing Computerized Social Interactions: An Examination of Event-Related Brain Potentials
Published on: November 15, 2014
05:21Characterization of the Sense of Agency over the Actions of Neural-machine Interface-operated Prostheses
Published on: January 7, 2019
Related Concept Videos
Surveys
Correspondence Bias
Group Polarization
Framing Effects
Bias
In statistics, a sampling bias is created when a sample is collected from a population, and some members of the population are not as likely to be chosen as others (remember, each member...
The Representativeness Heuristic