In Brief: Will Gen Z Know ‘Election Day’ at All?

Gen Z can do everything from home. If that becomes the voting norm, there’s no going back.

Political analyst Elle Purnell warns about a looming reality for the foreseeable future: Mail-in voting as the norm rather than the exception. Why? Because young people are already used to doing everything else from home.

Gen Z, by the way, went for Democrats by huge margins in the last election. Young people typically do, but it was far easier for the mail-in generation. The New York Times found that in 2020, Colorado’s all-mail system increased voter turnout in this age cohort “by 16 percentage points.”

Naturally, Democrats won’t be keen to give up this new and built-in advantage they enjoy. “Voting is a duty as well as a right,” Purnell says, but that’s a tough message to sell when the opposing message is so easy and appealing. Yes, the opportunity for fraud and other problems is vastly more pronounced with a mail-in system, but to Democrats, that’s a feature, not a bug. She concludes: