After a spring election in which Democrats were victorious across the suburbs, DuPage County Republicans are launching a pilot program to encourage mail-in voting among their GOP base.
Set to begin in earnest until later this summer, party officials have high hopes the initiative will help the GOP regain strength in DuPage, a once Republican stronghold that has been shifting blue for years now.
“For numerous cycles now, strong DuPage County Republican candidates have been defeated by lesser Democratic candidates who have benefitted to an enormous degree from vote-by-mail (VBM) voting,” DuPage GOP Chairman Kevin Coyne, a former Naperville City Council member, said in a statement on social media earlier this month.
“Those days are over effective today. … Numerous states have witnessed Republicans dominate vote-by-mail returns. DuPage County will be no different.”
Through the pilot program, the local party will be encouraging Republican voters in select precincts across DuPage to sign up for the county’s permanent vote-by-mail program, Coyne said in a call.
Any eligible registered voter in DuPage can vote by mail ahead of an election. Voters can request to do so per election or opt into the county’s permanent vote-by-mail program, which would sign them up to receive mail-in ballots each election.
DuPage Republicans will be working with M3 Strategies, a Chicago-based political consulting firm, to conduct the pilot program later this summer, Coyne said.
The hope is it will help get Republicans on “equal footing” with Democrats in DuPage, he said.
To date, significantly more Democratic primary voters are on the county’s permanent vote-by-mail list, DuPage County Chief Deputy Clerk Adam Johnson.
As of Wednesday, there was a total of 98,413 voters on the county’s permanent vote-by-mail list, according to Johnson. That number divides into voters who have opted to receive mail-ballots for general elections only and those who have requested to also receive primary ballots, he said.
The latter is how the county can glean the partisan divide in its vote-by-mail program as voters must request either a Democratic or Republican primary ballot.
Current numbers show that 47,110 Democratic primary voters have signed up for the program compared to 19,525 Republican voters, Johnson said. Those totals have also grown since the 2022 primary election, which was the first in which the permanent vote-by-mail program was offered. In 2022, there were 20,482 Democratic primary voters compared to 8,009 Republican voters.
“The Democrats, to their credit, have done a really good job of getting their voters to sign up for it. Republicans have not,” Coyne said. “Until we close that gap, it’s going to be really, really hard for Republicans to win around here. … It’s a massive advantage that they have right now, and we simply have to address it.”
Republicans were once at least as likely as Democrats to vote by mail, but the dynamics changed in 2020 when President Donald Trump turned against early in-person and mail voting. He spun conspiracies about the process and convinced his supporters to wait until Election Day to cast their ballots. The Republican Party also amplified dark rumors about mail ballots to explain Trump’s 2020 loss.
However, national messaging has shifted over the past couple of years, with the GOP changing course to encourage early and mail voting for the November 2024 election cycle.
As far as if and to what extent the partisan divide in voting by mail impacts election results, that’s hard to measure, said Stephen Maynard Caliendo, a dean and political science professor at North Central College in Naperville. That’s the sort of question that runs into something called the ecological inference problem, which is the process of using aggregate data to draw conclusions about individual-level behavior, Caliendo said.
“In other words, there’s no way to know whether vote-by-mail actually helped Democrats because we can’t know … (who) the people (who voted by mail) exactly voted for,” he said.
Still, research has tried to suss out an answer. A 2021 Stanford University study found that record rates of mail voting in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t help Democrats or lead to an increase in voting. The research was the latest in a number of studies finding no partisan benefit to mail voting.
However, Caliendo said broadening ways to vote is a worthwhile pursuit.
“Even if you’re wrong, even if it hasn’t really hurt you,” he said, “expanding vote by mail isn’t going to hurt you among your own voters. … If (a party has) the resources to dedicate to this, it makes a lot of sense that they’re going to do it. I encourage it because anytime … (we remove) barriers for people to vote, that’s better for democracy.”
Coyne promoted the county’s permanent vote-by-mail program as a means of getting more information out to voters, even if they still opt to vote in person.
“You can still vote in person, even if you’re registered for vote-by-mail balloting,” he said. “But there’s a lot of reasons to do it.”
Receiving a ballot ahead of time in itself is an important notification that an election is going on, Johnson said. That’s especially true for local consolidated elections in the spring “when voters aren’t seeing (the election) on the news every day,” he said.
Coyne, who has chaired DuPage County Republicans since January, said devoting more energy to mail-in voting had “always kind of been on our radar” but the results of the spring election made it clear action was needed.
In April, Democrats pulled out wins in all 49 contested partisan races across the county, according to Dianne McGuire, vice chair of the Democratic Party of DuPage County.
“Until we stop complaining about vote-by-mail being here and accept that it is here and do something about it,” Coyne said, “I think Republicans are going to have to deal with a lot of ugly elections.”
The Associated Press contributed.