At the Smithsonian | October 4, 2024 11:30 a.m.

What the Long History of Mail-In Voting in the U.S. Reveals About the Election Process

A recent exhibition shows how soldiers sent in votes during the Civil War and World War II, as many Americans would in 2020 following the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic

U.S. Army Pfc. Chyna Williams (left) helps Staff Sgt. Janeen Butler at a voter assistance drive on a base in Qatar, 2008 Dustin Senger

Roger Catlin

Museums Correspondent

During the Civil War, soldiers who would normally need to take a few days to return home to cast a vote were allowed to do so at the battlefield, and those votes were mailed back to the proper precinct.

A clerk’s tally sheet for Highland County, Ohio, taken from voting soldiers at a Union Army field hospital in Georgia and an illustration from Harper’s Weekly in 1864 depicting Union soldiers lined up to cast ballots at a Pennsylvania campsite are featured in a new display at the National Postal Museum called “Voting by Mail: Civil War to Covid-19.”

The exhibition, open now until February 2025, showcases both the historical and current relevance of mail-in voting, particularly as the country is in an election year.

“For us, it’s a quick pop-up—trying to be responsive to the zeitgeist, the conversation happening in the country,” says Carrie Villar, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs.

Mail-in voting in 2020, she adds, “cropped up as a new idea almost, during the pandemic. And while it may have seemed that way, I think if you had asked most voters if they had heard of absentee voting, they would have said, ‘Oh, sure.’”

The Postal Museum collection tracks mail-in voting as far back as the 18th century in the United States, with a folded letter holding the results from the 1792 election in York County, Massachusetts, or what is now southern Maine, logging 40 votes for John Hancock as governor and 29 for Samuel Adams as lieutenant governor.

In those days, men (the only people allowed to participate) in Massachusetts could mail in votes if their homes were “vulnerable to Indian attack,” as historian Alex Keyssar wrote in his 2000 book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.

Because those were considered state and local voting issues, they are not included in the exhibition, Villar says.

Civil War envelope to mail soldiers’ votes on a tally sheet for the Ohio state election in 1864 National Postal Museum

Ohio’s decision to extend the vote to military personnel stationed outside their home districts during the Civil War had some precedents: Pennsylvania passed legislation allowing military exemptions for in-person voting in 1813, amid the War of 1812; New Jersey followed suit two years later.

By 1862, a majority of the 11 Confederate states established absentee voting by their soldiers. That same year, Missouri became the first Union state to allow it.

But there was a special push in 1864 because of worries about Abraham Lincoln’s re-election. Letters from Private Isaac Walters of the 20th Indiana Infantry’s Company F to his sister-in-law describe sick and injured soldiers sent from Virginia to Indiana to vote days before the presidential election after the state failed to enact absentee voting.

In one of his letters, Walters wrote that the soldiers “were furloughed to give old Abe a hoist but didn’t get there in time, but [Lincoln] got through safe anyhow.”

In the decades after the war, mail-in voting evolved and became more widespread. Kansas became the first state to allow voting by mail in 1901, but only for railroad employees who traveled for work.

Pictures of President Calvin Coolidge and first lady Grace Coolidge show them being sworn in as meeting the criteria for Massachusetts absentee voting in 1924 and sitting at a small wooden table picturesquely placed on the White House South Lawn. It was only the second time the first lady could cast such a vote in a presidential election—the 19th Amendment securing women’s right to vote was ratified in 1920.

One photograph shows another historical moment: Alice Fujinaga, one of the over 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in government camps during World War II, waiting for her 1942 absentee ballot to be notarized at California’s Camp Tule Lake, the largest of the ten War Relocation Authority Camps.

“They were still citizens, so they were allowed to vote,” Villar says. But in many cases, they had to do so blindly, since they were cut off from all political information.

“It would have been a whole lot easier to say, ‘Forget it, I’m not voting,’” she says. “But the fact that so many of them tried to and did, like the women in the photo, shows there’s really power in casting your vote. It might be something we take for granted, but it is an average citizen’s moment of having an impact on their government—the act of voting.”

Japanese Americans prepare their absentee ballots to vote while incarcerated at Tule Lake, California, in 1942 National Archives

World War II and its massive displacements of soldiers increased the demand for mail-in voting. Millions of ballot request postcards were distributed to personnel in the armed forces deployed around the world. All 48 states at the time had established absentee voting for military personnel.

“In 1944, they printed the ballots before the candidates were actually finalized, because of the logistics of getting it out,” Villar says. One-fourth of American service members cast absentee ballots that year, with some 100,000 using Official Federal War Ballots that depended entirely on write-in entries.

Not addressed in the exhibition are the politicization of mail-in voting and suspicions, generally unfounded, about mail-in voter fraud.

“We don’t have anything in the collection related to fraud, so it’s a question we don’t go deep into,” Villar says, adding that “the question of election integrity comes up in every election. It even comes up in that 1864 letter.”

Studies have shown that mail-in voting fraud is rare, even as mail-in voting increased in 2020 to accommodate the millions of Americans sheltered at home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Official Federal War Ballot issued in 1944 for absentee voting by members of the U.S. Armed Forces National Postal Museum

Several items from the 2020 election are on display, including a U.S. Postal Service general information card encouraging voters to prepare for mail-in voting and an absentee ballot from the District of Columbia Board of Elections. When Washington, D.C. officials decided to send out ballots to all registered voters in response to the pandemic, 11 percent of them were returned as undeliverable, showcasing problems in updating its voter registration rolls. “It’s an imperfect system if the rolls aren’t up to date,” Villar says.

Also on display is the initial printing of a 2020 absentee ballot sheet from Franklin County, Ohio, which had incorrect precinct and candidate information.

“It was caught right away and corrected,” Villar says. “Anytime humans are involved in something, there’s a chance for human error. That’s why we have so many checks and balances.”

Officials notified the voters who’d received incorrect ballots and mailed replacements, also allowing them the option to cast ballots at polling locations.

“It’s really a huge machine of people that makes our elections run,” Villar says. “And it’s amazing when you think: We have over 10,000 jurisdictions, and all of them have their own sets of rules. We don’t have one national standard of how to run an election. The fact that we can get pretty good results on election night and have it go so smoothly, it’s really kind of amazing.”