From entitlement to service: how is absentee voting transforming electoral processes?

Absentee voting has originally been envisioned as a way to democratize electoral procedures, but its introduction in many countries challenges the legitimacy of elections, increasing risks of fraud, potentially changing the composition of the electorate, and putting voters in unequal circumstances. This article provides an overview and synthesis of responses to questions about how absentee voting (by mail and Internet) is transforming electoral processes in democratic regimes at both the micro and macro levels. In particular, the review focuses on the normative criticism of absentee voting, the theoretical and empirical responses to this criticism, and the positive and negative effects of its implementation, both large-scale and reflected in the electoral behavior of citizens who choose different ways of voting, as identified by researchers. The article also provides a semi-systematic overview of the results of the studies answering the questions about the influence of remote voting on the turnout and composition of the electorate. Albeit the issues addressed in the article are not typically examined from the angle proposed here and are not purely empirical, the review seeks to extract new knowledge from a synthesis and critique of relevant research. The article demonstrates the potential for pooling efforts in the study of absentee voting formats instead of focusing on specific modes as fundamentally different from one another. The review allows us to highlight promising directions for the study of both absentee voting and other alternative voting formats: the analysis of subnational variation of their effects, as well as longitudinal studies at the micro-level.

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