The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Will Gen Z Know 'Election Day' at All?
Political analyst Elle Purnell warns about a looming reality for the foreseeable future: Mail-in voting as the norm rather than the exception. Why? Because young people are already used to doing everything else from home.
Republicans have raised a host of legitimate concerns about the push to turn Election Day into election month and do away with the in-person voting model for a weeks-long process of disseminating and collecting votes by mail. Mass mail-in balloting increases the opportunities for fraud and ballot curing and harvesting, and it contributes to the ballot-counting fiascos we see in places like Arizona, delaying the determination of winners and undermining voter confidence. But there’s another, under-discussed consequence of the push for a permanent mail-in voting infrastructure: Gen Z is coming of age without knowing anything else.
As renting a movie evolved from driving to a Blockbuster, to ordering a Netflix DVD in the mail, to instantaneously streaming anything we want, we’ve grown up. We shop from our phones, and our purchases are influenced by social media. We take Prime two-day delivery and pre-printed return labels for granted. Even online grocery shopping subscriptions have taken hold, fueled by but outlasting the Covid lockdowns. We gravitate toward the convenience of working from home. Many of us can renew our driver’s licenses online.
This is the lifestyle and attitude Gen Z brings to voting. It’s already typical for many young people to cast their first few ballots absentee, if they start voting while they’re in college. Gen Z voters who voted for the first time (or their first time post-college) in 2020 may have never cast a vote in person, thanks to the mass mail-in ballot operations that were shoved through under the guise of Covid concern. Republicans need to understand that if Gen Z comes to see mass voting by mail for any reason as normal, it will be next to impossible to go back.
Gen Z, by the way, went for Democrats by huge margins in the last election. Young people typically do, but it was far easier for the mail-in generation. The New York Times found that in 2020, Colorado’s all-mail system increased voter turnout in this age cohort “by 16 percentage points.”
That turnout increase is not a surprise, as having a ballot mailed to you eliminates a lot of the already-minimal initiative and ownership required for an able-bodied American to get himself to the polls on Election Day. If the state mails you a ballot unprompted, a Democrat ballot chaser calls you or knocks on your door, hounds you to fill it out, and offers to drop it off for you (and even offers you a voting guide!), then suddenly your ownership of your own ballot is close to zero — you’re a cog in Democrats’ voting machine, and they like it that way.
Naturally, Democrats won’t be keen to give up this new and built-in advantage they enjoy. “Voting is a duty as well as a right,” Purnell says, but that’s a tough message to sell when the opposing message is so easy and appealing. Yes, the opportunity for fraud and other problems is vastly more pronounced with a mail-in system, but to Democrats, that’s a feature, not a bug. She concludes:
Once people become accustomed to conveniences, though, it’s hard to give them up. When those conveniences weaken the integrity of electoral processes and undercut voter autonomy, people who value secure, straightforward elections should want to minimize them. But Republicans are falling asleep at the wheel while Democrats accustom an entire generation to having their ballots dropped off at home to be filled out at their convenience over a weeks-long period.
The longer these fiascos are normalized, the fewer people will realize how abnormal they are. If Republicans in office ever want to go back to Election Day as they know it, they’d better work now to make sure Gen Z knows “Election Day” at all.