‘Naked ballots’ are back — and they’re a danger to democracy

Marc Meredith, Katie Steele, Daniel J. Hopkins — Read time: 4 minutes

Democracy Dies in Darkness

‘Naked ballots’ are back — and they’re a danger to democracy

In 2020, tens of thousands of Pennsylvania voters were disenfranchised over this tricky mail-in ballot requirement. It may happen again in 2022.

October 19, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

An absentee ballot application sits atop mailed-in requests, some of the 47 received this day, for an absentee ballot at the Carroll County Board of Elections in Carrollton, Ohio, on Sept. 26. (Phil Long/AP)

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About six weeks before the 2020 general election, alarm bells rang, warning about possible mass disenfranchisement in the keystone state. That’s because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots must not be counted unless voters followed proper procedure: They had to place ballots in a secrecy envelope, which had no identifying information, before placing that in the ballot return envelope. Civic education groups, election officials and parties quickly launched campaigns, often on social media, to contact people who might be at risk of casting soon-to-be-nullified ballots. In one widely viewed video, celebrities such as Chris Rock and Amy Schumer took off their clothes to encourage voters not to return a naked ballot.

The risk of disenfranchisement was real. In Philadelphia County, at least 15,000 naked ballots were cast in the June 2020 primary election. If there were a similar share of naked ballots in the general election, 30,000 to 40,000 voters would see their mail ballots rejected in Philadelphia County alone, with possibly thousands more elsewhere in the state. This could have affected the outcome: In Pennsylvania, the 2016 election was decided by about 44,000 votes.

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However, our research suggests that the worst-case prediction did not come true. Statewide, only 20,000 to 30,000 naked ballots were ultimately rejected in November 2020. Philadelphians who did cast naked ballots were disproportionately less experienced voters as well as voters of color, which aligns with other research on who casts mail ballots with disqualifying errors.

Perhaps more surprisingly, older voters — those born in the 1970s or earlier — were more likely to cast naked ballots than younger voters. We suspect this is because younger people were more likely than older people to have been exposed to the social media campaigns on naked ballots.

When can educational campaigns help voters?

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Before those results were in, we conducted an experiment to investigate whether information about naked ballots could help voters. Together with the student organization Penn Leads the Vote, we designed a postcard that highlighted important steps in the mail-balloting process. This postcard was sent to a random subset of registrants who requested mail ballots in Philadelphia County for the 2020 general election.

The people who received a postcard were a bit less likely to submit a naked ballot than those who did not receive it, although this difference was not statistically significant. But we did find that postcard recipients returned their mail ballots more quickly and were less likely to cancel their mail ballots than non-recipients. This suggests the postcard was helpful.

The postcard we designed was similar to numerous mailings that were sent throughout Pennsylvania, alongside extensive news coverage and social media campaigns. Other states launched similar efforts to inform voters about how to ensure their mail ballot would be counted. These efforts appeared to work: While many experts predicted an increase in ballot rejection rates, the rate was almost 20 percent lower in 2020 than in 2016.

Learning the wrong lessons for 2022

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But the risk of rejected mail ballots has only increased since 2020 — and this time around, news coverage and social media campaigns are far less prominent than they were two years ago. The 2022 primary election revealed the risks of not taking naked ballots seriously. One Pennsylvania Democratic state Senate primary received 117 naked ballots out of approximately 10,000 mail ballots cast — in a race that was decided by just 42 votes.

Several states such as Pennsylvania have more obstacles to voting by mail than in 2020. Unlike in 2020, mail ballots in Pennsylvania must be received, not just postmarked, by Election Day. In that same Democratic primary, 143 mail ballots were rejected because they were received too late.

Moreover, in 2020, mail ballots were counted even when Pennsylvania voters did not properly date their signature on their return envelope. But now there is ongoing litigation to determine whether such ballots will count in 2022. And while a court recently said counties could inform voters that they have returned mail ballots with a potential error, this ruling may be appealed. If that appeal is successful, elections officials won’t be able to help voters “cure” mail ballots with errors.

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In the next few weeks, voters arguably need more help to ensure their mail ballots are counted. Any celebrities still willing to get naked?

Marc Meredith (@mieuque) is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Katie Steele is the assistant director of the Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel J. Hopkins (@dhopkins1776) is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized” (University of Chicago Press, 2018).