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After 2020’s mail-ballot blip, many Americans are embracing in-person voting again [1]
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Date: 2025-07-27
Seven in 10 voters showed up at a polling place in 2024, either early or on Election Day, an MIT study finds.
By Jessica Huseman for Votebeat
After years of speculation about the “death” of in-person voting, the latest national data shows a bit of a rebound: Americans are returning to the polls in person.
According to a new MIT report titled “How We Voted in 2024” — released exclusively to Votebeat — more than 7 in 10 voters showed up to a polling place to vote, either early or on Election Day. And while voting habits are still shifting after the pandemic, some clear patterns are emerging.
Voting by mail, which surged to 43% of ballots cast in 2020, dropped to 29% in 2024. That’s still above the 21% seen in 2016 and 13% in 2012, suggesting that voting from home remains more popular than it once was. At the same time, in-person voting made a comeback. In 2020, just 31% of voters cast their ballots on Election Day, down from at least 60% in previous presidential election years. In 2024, the figure rebounded to 40%. Early in-person voting also continued its slow rise, reaching 31% last year.
Together, these trends show that while some pandemic-era habits are sticking, many voters are returning to the polling place — either early or on Election Day, said Charles Stewart, a political scientist who heads the MIT Election Lab and wrote the report.
Other things are leveling out as well. The partisan divide on vote by mail is narrowing, Stewart said. “Election administration continues to be very salient to Republicans,” he said, while Democrats have “kind of gone back to their business.”
What’s driving the shift to in-person voting?
The drop in mail voting was largely driven by Democrats reverting to in-person voting. In 2020, 60% of Democrats voted by mail; in 2024, that number dropped to 37%. Republicans remained less enthusiastic about mail voting, with 24% using the method in 2024, down from 32% in 2020.
Stewart said the shift likely stems from Republican messaging. GOP leaders resisted expanding early and mail voting during the pandemic, but that’s changing. The ultimate goal is voter turnout, and GOP consultants and strategists were “worried about being hamstrung by Democrats” when it came to getting voters to the polls, he explained. While Donald Trump remains skeptical of mail voting, Stewart said, many Republican political consultants actually favor early voting because it lets them “focus on the voters who actually need to be delivered to the polling place on Election Day.”
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