Definitions

Americans have many formal and informal phrases for describing the various roles mail has in the election process. This exhibition uses the following terms:

Official Election Mail, as defined by the US Postal Service, is “any item mailed to or from authorized election officials that enables citizens to participate in the voting process—including ballots, voter registration cards, absentee voting applications and polling place notifications.” USPS handles election materials while in the mail stream and provides guidance to election officials developing election mail and budgeting for the cost of postage.

Absentee Voting is when voters request ballots from their local election office so they can cast their votes by means other than at their voting center on election day. Some jurisdictions have criteria for excuse-based absentee voting. Absentee voting has taken many forms over time, such as designating a proxy to represent a voter, submitting ballots in an officially-designated drop box, or sending a ballot by mail.

All-Mail Voting is when election officials automatically mail ballots to registered voters in jurisdictions that allow universal voting by mail. Voters can return completed ballots by mail, deposit them in officially-designated drop boxes, or choose to vote in-person at the polls.

Voting by Mail refers to all-mail voting and to absentee voting with postal service use.

Political campaign mail is created and distributed by political parties, campaign committees, and individuals to promote candidates and political issues. Political mail is typically sent during campaign season up through election day. Note that this exhibition focuses on official election mail 1800s-2022, but examples of political campaign mail in the museum’s collection can be found through: Search the Collection, and in other collections of the Smithsonian Institution through Collections Search Center.

Voting by mail for non-governmental purposes is when organizations and companies use the postal service to gather votes from individuals. Examples include corporations that request votes from shareholders; unions and organizations that conduct elections of officials, seek award nominations, or solicit members’ opinions on political endorsements; or publishers, sports leagues, and organizations run public opinion polls to determine fan-favorites of amateur and professional athletes, actors, and more. Note, this exhibition focuses on official election mail, but you can read about an example of non-governmental voting by mail used by the US Postal Service to choose a stamp design. In 1992, USPS invited Americans to send a postcard to vote on images of Elvis Presley for a commemorative postage stamp, see The Elvis Stamp: America Elects a King and the resulting 1993 stamp issue at: 29c Elvis single.

From the 1910s to the 1930s the publishers of the Literary Digest conducted opinion polls by mailing ballots to residences across the United States. The surveys provided statistics on political candidates and issues like the Prohibition poll in 1930 for which envelopes like this were sent to 20 million addresses. The image here is a research record by the Curatorial Department of National Postal Museum collection holding of this New York, NY, postmarked, 1-cent metered cover addressed to Edmund Burnet of Washington, DC. For more information about the Literary Digest’s 1930 poll about prohibition, see film footage of Literary Digest workers preparing mailings on March 4, 1930 in the archival digital collection: Nationwide Poll on Prohibition—Outtakes, (Fox Movietone News Story 5-348.) Fox Movietone News Collection, Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina; and see pages 147-148 of Claude E. Robinson and Columbia University, Council for Research in the Social Sciences, Straw Votes: a Study of Political Prediction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1932.