Elections expert Barry Burden said he thought the partisan differences that voters expressed in the poll over voting-by-mail reflected the political debate that surfaced between the parties over the April election in Wisconsin, with Democratic politicians pushing for an all-mail election and Republican politicians opposing changes in the timing or conduct of the election.
President Donald Trump’s attacks on voting by-mail also fed the partisan debate.
But Burden expressed skepticism that the gap between how Democrats and Republicans choose to vote in November — whether by mail or in-person — will be as large as the poll suggests.
“It doesn’t reflect what we saw in the April 7 election (when) there was consistent but I would say modest differences between liberal and conservative voters in how they used mail ballots,” said Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the way elections are administered.