Charlotte Hill, Jacob Grumbach, Adam Bonica and Hakeem Jefferson have written this NYT oped:

The idea of “all-mail voting” is straightforward: Every registered voter gets sent a ballot via mail to their home address, then after making their choices, voters mail it back; and those who want to still travel to vote in person can do so. In the midst of this pandemic, it’s an adjustment that every state legislature should try to make.

But should we expand mail voting beyond the Covid-19 crisis?

Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, and Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at M.I.T., argue in a recent article, “States should approach this situation as an emergency, not as an opportunity to make long-term changes to election policy.” We disagree.

Our new research, published yesterday, shows that elections with all-mail voting increase turnout among everyone, especially groups that tend to vote less frequently. Those results merit permanent, wide-scale shifts. Currently, registered voters automatically get a ballot by mail in five states: Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado and Hawaii. A few other states have all-mail voting in small jurisdictions, and California has been gradually rolling it out.

Before this year, the results of research into all-mail voting’s turnout effect had been mixed. Past studies of all-mail voting, mostly of its early years in Oregon and California, argued that it does boost turnout, but mainly for those who already vote. If that remained true, then mail voting could actually exacerbate present inequalities in political participation.

So when we began our research, we wouldn’t have been surprised by unequal outcomes. Young people, notorious for their low turnout rates, use traditional mail less than other groups. And people of color — who have been subjected to centuries of voter discrimination — might be skeptical of adopting big changes to an electoral system that has disadvantaged them.

Our findings show, however, that low-turnout groups are the very groups that stand to benefit most from all-mail voting. Focusing on Colorado’s recent switch to vote-by-mail in 2013 and using the voter file — a comprehensive record of who turns out in American elections — we find that turnout goes up among everyone, especially the historically disenfranchised: young people, voters of color, less-educated people and blue-collar workers….

We also examine the inevitable question on politicians’ minds: What will this do for my re-election prospects? Looking at voters by political party, we find that Democrats and Republicans benefit about the same amount: around 8 percentage points.

This is somewhat surprising, given that groups historically associated with voting for Democrats benefit most from mail voting. One explanation may be that in Colorado, young people are choosing to register as independents rather than as Democrats. In fact, we found that Colorado’s shift to vote-by-mail increased the turnout of independents by 12 percentage points, more than among members of either major party.