Eight in 10 Americans Favor Early Voting, Photo ID Laws

With the midterm elections less than a month away, large majorities of Americans favor three measures meant to make voting easier: early voting (78% in favor), automatic voter registration (65%) and sending absentee ballots to all eligible voters (60%).

Majorities of Americans also oppose two measures that could make voting harder: removing inactive voters from voter lists (60%) and limiting the number of drop boxes for absentee ballots (59%). One restrictive policy that most Americans (79%) are on board with, however, is requiring photo identification to vote.

While various combinations of these policies have been adopted by states over the past decade, in 2020, the pandemic introduced a health-based impetus to facilitate more absentee ballot voting that some states are now building on and others are rolling back.

Of the six policies tested this year, sending absentee ballot applications to all eligible voters is the most politically polarized. Democrats favor this policy over Republicans by a 61-percentage-point margin, 88% versus 27%. There is a much smaller partisan gap with respect to automatic voter registration, favored by 81% of Democrats and nearly half of Republicans (47%).

Sizable party differences are also seen for limiting the number of drop boxes for absentee ballots and removing lapsed voters from voter registration lists. About six in 10 Republicans favor each of these positions, compared with fewer than two in 10 Democrats.