Every election cycle, tens of millions of Americans vote without setting foot in a polling place. Their local election office mails them a paper ballot, they mark it at home, and they hand it back to a letter carrier to return. Over the past three decades this has grown from a niche convenience into how almost a third of the country votes: the share of voters casting a ballot by mail rose from 7.8% in 1996 to 21% in 2016, surged to 43% in the pandemic election of 2020, and settled at 29% in 2024 (Figure 1). In that election, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) carried roughly 99 million ballots to and from voters.
That national average masks wide variation among the states: in Oregon and Washington, more than 95% of voters cast their ballots by mail, while in West Virginia and Tennessee fewer than 3% do (Figure 2). Eight states and the District of Columbia now mail a ballot to every registered voter, while elsewhere voters must request one, often only if they have a specific reason for doing so. That approach began in the West, where Oregon became the first all-mail state in 2000 and much of the region followed. What determines a state’s mail-voting rate is this policy, not its geography: where a ballot arrives automatically, most voters use it; where it must be requested, as in rural West Virginia and Tennessee, far fewer do.
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