BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Four years after Pennsylvania's introduction of mail-in ballots, requests are down and less partisan than they've ever been, newly released voting data shows.
The Pennsylvania Department of State reported that 2.18 million Pennsylvanians have been approved for a mail-in ballot this election. More than 1.55 million, or almost 71%, have already been returned to their local county elections offices.
While Tuesday was the deadline to apply, that number of mail-in ballots will grow slightly. A Lehigh County judge approved a motion to extend in-person applications an extra day due to road closures Tuesday caused by the Donald Trump campaign rally across the street from the government center in Allentown.
The wait for a mail-in ballot was already an hour-long at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning.
Wherever the final number of approved requests lands, it will be far below the 3.08 million requests Pennsylvania fielded in the 2020 election.
That year, 1.94 million (63%) of those requests came from registered Democrats, another 772,318 (25%) came from registered Republicans and 366,566 (12%) came from voters not affiliated with the major parties.
While requests are down across the board in 2024, the sharpest drop-off comes from Democrats. Only 1.19 million Democrats requested a mail-in ballot this year, accounting for 54.7% of requested mail-in ballots.
Republican requests fell to 710,222, but their share jumped to 32.4% of the ballots. Requests from other voters fell to 280,096, but their share remained about the same at 12.8% of all requests.
Lehigh Valley numbers
The trends were similar in the Lehigh Valley.
As of Tuesday morning, Lehigh County approved 33,965 requests from registered Democrats (54.2%), 19,554 from registered Republicans (31.2%) and 9,066 from other voters (14.4%). While the requests may still go up slightly, the county had 24,743 fewer requests compared to 2020 as of 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, according to state data.
In Northampton County, 34,561 registered Democrats (52.6%) requested a mail-in ballot compared to 21,007 Republicans (31.9%) and 10,121 other voters (15.4%). That's a total of 65,689 approved mail-in ballot requests in the county, a 20.6% drop from the 82,762 ballot requests Northampton County had four years ago.
"We thought if we could get this down to 2-to-1 (Democratic advantage), we would probably feel good heading into Election Day. Where things stand, we're well below 2-to-1, which is extremely good."Arnaud Armstrong, Win Again Political Action Committee
The drop in requests is not unexpected. In an interview earlier this month, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt said state officials expected less demand due to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The drop in mail-in ballots should help ease the demand placed on county election workers as they tally votes.
Republican inroads
Former President Trump previously leveled baseless claims that mail-in ballots were prone to fraud, scaring Republican voters away from the system.
But that ceded a significant advantage to Democrats, who successfully enrolled low-propensity voters who otherwise might have sat out.
Arnaud Armstrong, the executive director of conservative mail-in ballot group Win Again Political Action Committee, cheered the inroads Republicans have made.
Party leadership has tried to reverse the trend for years, recognizing the deficit put them too far behind to win contested races.
"We thought if we could get this down to 2-to-1 (Democratic advantage), we would probably feel good heading into Election Day. Where things stand, we're well below 2-to-1, which is extremely good," Armstrong said.
Tuesday was the first time in state history that Republicans returned more mail-in ballots across the state than Democrats, Armstrong said.
Conservative speakers have stressed the importance of early voting in recent events.
During a Saturday rally for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick, U.S. Sen. Jodi Ernst, R-Iowa, said that John Fetterman knew he won the 2022 U.S. Senate race before polls opened on Election Day because Democrats had a 750,000 advantage in mail-in ballots.
Christopher Borick, Muhlenberg College political science professor, said data means voters should expect to see less of a "red mirage" than in past years.
Because more Republicans voted in person in the past and those ballots were processed first in most counties, conservative candidates appeared to jump to early leads that whittled away as the Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots were counted.
"The partisan divides are going to be less stark in terms of mail-in and day-of results," Borick said.
Managing producer Stephanie Sigafoos contributed to this report.
