The Real Cost of Universal Mail Voting: Nearly 20 Million Ballots Sent, Never Returned

Mail voting is seen as one of the most convenient ways Americans can cast a ballot. It is admittedly difficult to argue otherwise. But convenience and effectiveness are two different things. When you look at the raw data from the federal government's Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS), it begs a serious question: are states that automatically send a mail ballot to every registered voter getting a good return on that investment?

The numbers suggest that many of them are not.

Nearly One in Three Mail Ballots Goes Nowhere

In the 2024 general election, state and local election officials across the country transmitted around 66.7 million mail ballots to registered voters. Of those, only 47.5 million ended up being returned and counted, leaving nearly 19.2 million ballots, or roughly 28.8% of all mail ballots sent, rejected or in a landfill.

We aren’t talking about a couple of inevitably spoiled ballots here. That is nearly one in three ballots mailed out that were wasted. Printed, stuffed, addressed, stamped, and delivered to a doorstep, only to end up in the trash.

The picture becomes more clear when you isolate the states that have adopted universal vote-by-mail where they automatically send a ballot to every active registered voter regardless of whether they requested one. These states account for roughly 66% of all mail ballots transmitted nationally, but an even larger share of the waste.

Where the Gap Is Widest

The unreturned ballot problem is most apparent in states with universal mail programs. Using 2024 EAVS data, here is how the largest universal or near-universal mail states fared:

Nevada stands out as the largest discrepancy. Despite transmitting over two million ballots, fewer than one in three were ultimately counted. That means election officials in Nevada printed, processed, and mailed more than 1.4 million ballots that voters never used. Nevada adopted automatic universal vote-by-mail in 2021, and in both the 2022 midterm and 2024 presidential election, more than two-thirds of ballots sent were never returned.

California, the largest state by sheer volume, transmitted over 23 million ballots and saw nearly 10 million go uncounted, around half of everything it sent out.

Together, these ten states alone account for more than 16 million unreturned ballots in 2024.

What Does That Actually Cost?

Mailing a ballot is not free. The expense of each outbound ballot includes ballot design and printing (estimated at $0.21–$0.35 per ballot by print vendors), the outer envelope and return envelope, and outbound postage. Election officials and ballot printing vendors have estimated total outbound costs ranging from $0.65 to over $2.00 per ballot, depending on the state, ballot complexity/length, and volume. That does not include the administrative labor to process requests, maintain voter rolls, or handle the returned ballots that do come back, let alone the increased hours and burden on the post offices responsible for processing and facilitating the distribution and returns.

Using a conservative estimate of $1.50 per ballot for outbound printing and postage alone, the cost of the nearly 19.2 million unreturned ballots in 2024 amounts to roughly $28.8 million nationally. At a more complete $2.00 per ballot, which better accounts for envelope materials and staffing overhead, that amount rises to over $38 million.

The real issue here is that these costs are carried by election budgets that are already stretched thin. The same administrators lamenting that equipment and software is a decade old, staffing shortages for Election Day and absentee ballot processing, and underfunded ballot security measures are the ones absorbing the cost of mailing millions of ballots to voters who, for whatever reason, simply don’t use them.

This Is Not a Direct Argument Against Mail Voting

It is worth being direct about what exactly we are claiming here.

States with well-established opt-in absentee programs have strong return rates and mostly polished administrative processes built around managing the volume of ballots that actually come back. The efficiency problem described here is not inherent to mail voting in general, it is specific to the model of sending ballots to voters who never asked for them.

A voter who requests an absentee ballot has already signaled intent, they want it and they plan to use it. Return rates for requested ballots are significantly higher than for universally distributed ones precisely because the act of requesting a ballot is itself a filter that identifies voters who are engaged enough to take that step.

Universal automatic distribution removes that filter entirely and the data shows a significant portion of the electorate receiving a ballot they were never going to use. At the very least, the sensible first step improvement is to adopt an opt-in system and immediately reduce a significant portion of the waste.

Opportunity Cost

Every dollar spent mailing a ballot to a voter who throws it away is a dollar not spent on:

• Replacing aging voting equipment that in many jurisdictions is well past its recommended service life
• Expanding early voting locations and hours to reduce Election Day wait times
• Hiring and training more poll workers, with compensation to make their time worthwhile, which is a persistent challenge that has led to increasing reductions in polling places nationwide
• Investing in ballot security measures: signature verification technology, ballot tracking systems, secure drop-box infrastructure
• Cybersecurity improvements for voter registration systems and election infrastructure

These are not crazy trade-offs when election administration is chronically underfunded at the local level. County election offices routinely operate with flat budgets, aging infrastructure, and lean staffing. When a meaningful portion of that budget goes toward printing and mailing ballots to voters who clearly do not want them, it is a ball and chain dragging down everything else those offices could be doing.

The Loss of Trust

The fiscal waste documented above is real and measurable. But there is another intangible cost that is arguably more consequential: what millions of unaccounted-for ballots floating through the mail system do to public confidence in elections.

In September 2020, a temporary election worker in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, accidentally discarded nine military absentee ballots into a dumpster outside the elections building. Seven of those ballots had been taken out of their envelopes, revealing votes cast for Donald Trump. Investigators later determined the worker had a traumatic brain injury and had made an honest mistake. But by the time the investigation concluded, the claim that thousands of ballots had been dumped in dumpsters had already been made on the national stage. A single incident of human error that is unavoidable in any high-volume mail operation had become a national scandal implying a stolen election.

That same year, a postal employee in New Jersey admitted to dumping 1,875 pieces of mail into dumpsters, including 99 general election ballots destined for residents in West Orange. The ballots were recovered and redelivered, and the employee was prosecuted. But recovered and redelivered is not the same as never lost to begin with and the image of election ballots in a dumpster, once it circulates on social media, does not come with a disclaimer explaining that the matter was resolved without injury.

More recently, in April 2026, a box containing approximately 360 ballots spanning multiple election cycles with significant numbers from 2022 and 2024 was discovered near a dumpster in Renton, Washington, by a man who came across it while dumping trash. Washington is a universal vote-by-mail state. The ballots were largely unopened, and the discovery was described by an attorney involved as highlighting “a broken chain of custody” they couldn’t figure out exactly what happened to them. The optics are exactly what critics of universal mail voting have long warned about: ballots, by the hundreds, turning up in places they were never supposed to be.

These incidents do not prove wholesale fraud, but when only 44% of Americans responded to an AP poll that they had “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the 2024 vote count would be accurate that says something.

Nearly 60% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working in the United States, according to a Pew Research Center survey, and a significant number do not trust that federal election outcomes are valid. Elections that produce that level of distrust in the results are elections that fail at their most basic function. When millions of ballots are floating through a postal system that, by any honest accounting, is imperfect, loss, damage, or ending up in the wrong hands the vectors for doubt are always present, regardless of what the facts ultimately show.

Universal mail distribution creates a system with inherent chain-of-custody gaps that are genuinely difficult to explain to a skeptical public. When a voter casts a ballot in person, the chain is short and visible:

but with a mail ballot:

There are exponentially more links in that chain. Many more places where something can go wrong, or where disingenuous or ignorant individuals can claim something went wrong. The sheer volume of mail ballots that universal distribution generates makes auditing and accounting for every ballot truly impossible, and that gap in accountability is a perpetual gift to anyone whose interest lies in casting doubt on election results. Doubt we have seen raised across the political spectrum over decades.

Rejection Hurts

We have been mostly focused on the ballots that never come back. But there is a separate disenfranchisement problem in the ballots that do come back by mail and still don't get counted.

In 2024, EAVS data shows that at least 228,498 mail ballots were rejected across reporting states for reasons directly related to signature and administrative errors: missing voter signatures, signature mismatches, improperly sealed envelopes, missing witness signatures, and missing notarization. Add the 53,510 ballots that arrived after their state's deadline and the total of preventable rejections reaches at least 282,000 votes from people who went to the effort of filling out and returning a ballot, and ended up with nothing to show for it.

That 282,000 number only represents the states that reported a detailed breakdown of rejection reasons by category. Roughly seventeen states reported a total rejection number (EAVS field C6a) without providing the underlying reason-by-reason breakdown. The actual number of signature and timing-related rejections nationally is going to be substantially higher.

Coincidence? The more ballots a state sends out automatically, the more it relies on signature matching as its primary verification method, and signature matching is an imprecise science, applied at high volume by overworked, undertrained, and often temporary election staff, prone to both false positives that reject legitimate ballots and false negatives that let problematic ones through.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that every one of these rejections is entirely preventable.

When a voter walks into a polling place and feeds their ballot into a tabulator, the machine does not silently reject it and send a letter three days later. If the ballot contains an overvote the tabulator flags it immediately. The voter is informed on the spot so they can spoil their ballot and vote a new one, fixing it before they leave the building. The same applies to undervotes in races where the machine is configured to warn about them. No adjudication or hoping there is a phone number on your record to text or call you and let you know your vote won’t count.

Mail voting offers none of that reliable instant feedback. A ballot with a signature that was deemed inconsistent goes into a cure or rejection pile. In states with ballot curing processes, the voter may eventually be notified by mail or phone, and given a window to fix the problem. But curing requires voters to receive the notice, and successfully resolve the issue in time. Many never do and some never even know their ballot was rejected. Their vote simply did not count, and they have no idea. The ironic part is that in most cases they have to travel to an elections office during normal business hours anyways to fix it which almost certainly is going to be farther away than their local polling place.

The system regularly fails voters on technicalities that would never arise in a polling place. A voter who forgot to sign the outside of an envelope did not fail to try. They did try. The system failed them by not providing the immediate, in-the-moment feedback that in-person voting delivers.

This is also where the adjudication burden on election officials becomes significant. Ballots that cannot be automatically processed must go through a manual adjudication process involving bipartisan review boards, individual ballot-by-ballot determinations, and detailed documentation requirements. Every ballot that goes into adjudication represents administrative time and cost that would not exist if the voter had cast that ballot in person and immediately realized there was a problem when the tabulator spit it back out.

The election administration community works hard to handle all of this fairly and accurately, and makes a genuine effort to resolve these issues. But the pragmatic approach has to ask why we have designed a system that generates this volume of fixable errors in the first place when the alternative already exists, works, and costs substantially less to operate.

If You're Going to the Polls Anyway, What's the Point?

It is hard to find nationwide data to fully support this point, but it can be safely presumed the behavior pattern exists elsewhere. It had to do with information from Arizona in the 2024 election about mail ballots returned through the mail, vs mail ballots dropped off on election day. Colloquially called “late earlies”, mail ballots dropped off on election day have been partially to blame for one of the defining characteristics of Arizona elections… Slow election reporting.

Maricopa County which covers the Phoenix metro area is the third-largest voting jurisdiction in the United States. In the 2024 general election, they saw approximately 350,000 late early ballots dropped off at polling locations on Election Day. Meanwhile, according to the official Maricopa County canvass, only 12% of voters cast a traditional in-person ballot on Election Day, while 30% dropped off a mail ballot, meaning voters dropping off mail ballots at the polls outnumbered voters who actually cast a ballot in person by more than two to one.

According to the official canvass, just under 47% of Maricopa County voters returned their ballot by mail, meaning more than half of all votes cast involved someone physically going somewhere to vote or drop something off. Which raises an obvious question: if the majority of voters in a mostly mail jurisdiction are making a physical trip to cast or drop off their ballot, what exactly is the mail system accomplishing beyond generating millions of additional pieces of paper that need to be printed, processed, transported, signature-verified, and tabulated?

This is responsible for contributing directly to Arizona's now infamous multi-week counting window and the swirl of public confusion and suspicion that accompanies it because dropping off a ballot envelope on election day still means the normal mail ballot validation and processing has to occur.

Arizona has been attempting to address this with new legislation giving voters the option to open their mail ballot envelope at a polling place, show ID, and feed the ballot directly into a tabulator, but that comes at considerable additional administrative cost, as a workaround for a problem that in-person voting never had in the first place.

What We Risk Losing

This ties into something a loss on a budget sheet can't accurately capture: the experience of voting in person on Election Day.

Walking into a school or a community center, greeting a neighbor or friend working the check-in table, feeding your ballot into the machine, and walking out with that small sticker letting the world know you voted, is one of the few remaining rituals of American civic life that is shared by every demographic, every neighborhood, every difference of opinion. It is, at its best, a shared act. A community stopping for a moment together, on the same day, to do the same thing. There is a reason people proudly wear that sticker for the rest of the day, show it off, post a photo of it. It signals participation in something larger than themselves, and it invites others to do the same.

Elections should not feel like a transaction. Fill out your form on the kitchen counter, seal it up in an envelope, drop it in a mailbox, just another thing you have to do… They should feel like an occasion. Many other countries treat them that way: designated national holidays, polling places that feel welcoming rather than cursory, a collective sense that this Tuesday belongs to the citizens. That isn’t some naive or nostalgic callback to days gone by, it is a conscious design used across the globe. The more we distribute the act of voting across weeks of early ballots and millions of mail envelopes, the more we drain Election Day of the communal energy that makes participation feel meaningful and contagious. Civic enthusiasm is a social phenomenon. People vote when they see their neighbors and friends voting. That feedback loop is harder to sustain when voting is a solitary act spread across weeks.

None of this means mail voting should be completely unavailable. But it is worth asking whether the constant push toward universal mail-in voting is serving voters or simply making life easier for election offices and whether or not, in the process, we are trading something genuinely valuable for something simply convenient.

Final Thoughts

Circling back around to the original premise, nearly 19.2 million mail ballots were transmitted in 2024 and never returned. In states with universal automatic distribution, the unreturned rate ranged from 14% to over 68%. The conservative cost of those unreturned ballots in printing, postage, and materials alone amounts to tens of millions of dollars annually across election budgets that really can’t afford the waste.

Mail voting is a legitimate, important option for some American voters. But automatically sending a ballot to every voter, regardless of whether they asked for one or are likely to use it, is a policy choice and the data suggests it is worth re-examining with a critical eye.