Gen Z Can Do Everything From Home. If That Becomes The Voting Norm, There’s No Going Back

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.

Research in 2020 by The New York Times analyzed the all-mail voting system in Colorado, in which all potential voters were mailed their ballots and could simply mail their completed ballots back, leave them in a drop box, or show up at the polls to cast them in person. The Times found that all-mail voting increased turnout overall, but particularly among young voters, where “turnout increases 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.

Suddenly, also, Democrats — who have long capitalized on massive, month-long “get out the vote” operations while Republicans are still trying to win on Election Day alone — have a cushy surplus of votes. While the prevailing corporate media narrative insists