Some musings on method of votes cast in Florida

Fewer than one-in-four Republicans voted on Election Day in the 2024 General Election

In a recent article in the NYTimes, Nick Corasaniti reported that “Republicans made almost universal gains in mail voting during the 2024 election, eroding a key Democratic advantage in nearly every state that tracks party registration.”

Corasaniti’s analysis is based on the work of my colleague at UF, Mike McDonald, who for years has been tracking early vote totals across the country. As Corasaniti notes in his piece, the “share of mail voters who were registered Republicans jumped to 33 percent in 2024 from 24 percent in 2020, according to data from the Election Lab at the University of Florida, while Democrats dropped to 56 percent of the mail-voting electorate in 2024 after registering 65 percent in 2020.”

Despite “Republicans’ yearslong skepticism toward mail voting, fueled by President-elect Donald J. Trump’s false claims about fraud,” as Corasaniti correctly notes, many Republicans actually have no aversion to voting by mail. Even in the 2020 GE when Trump signaled his opposition to voting by mail, many of his supporters (Republicans and Independents alike) continued to vote by mail. What is key to understanding the rebound of VBM among Republicans is that a sizeable share of Republicans are just lying to pollsters when asked if they plan to (or did) vote by mail, as they adhered to their leader’s talking points.

In our article “Lying for Trump,” my coauthors Enrijeta Shino and Laura Uribe document how many of Trump’s supporters were want to misrepresent their past voting method as well as how they intended to vote in the 2020 GE. Drawing on a novel, large, and representative survey of registered voters in Florida fielded near the apex of Trump’s attack on mail voting in July 2020, and using election administration records to validate respondents’ voting behavior over time, our study reveals how elite cues can affect voters’ perceptions of legitimate methods to cast a ballot. We test whether voters who usually cast mail-in ballots, and particularly those who said they planned to vote for Trump’s reelection, were more likely to misreport the method by which they usually voted and/or misreport the method by which they said they expected to vote in November 2020. Our research design allows us to validate the actual method by which over 11,000 voters in Florida cast their ballots, and in doing so, isolate the impact of elite cue-taking and expressive responding on how voters report the method by which they vote—and, critically, how they actually behave.

In Florida, over 1m registered Republicans cast VBM ballots int he 2024 GE. As the figure below reveals, only one in five (22.2%) of registered Republicans who cast valid ballots in the election did so with a mail ballot. (The figure excludes more than 17k rejected VBM and 8.8k rejected provisional ballots.)