The 2024 voting landscape is a recipe for confusion

This November, millions of voters will cast a ballot for the first time since the pandemic. But a lot has changed about voting since 2020 — the voting methods that are available (and preferable), new voting laws both restrictive and expansive and a trend of high turnout unprecedented in recent years. In the last four years, America has changed many of the ingredients that go into its electoral process. Will these new ingredients merely alter the flavor of Election Day, or is it a recipe for disaster?

"Voters are facing a lot of changes, but some of them are good," said Hannah Fried, the executive director of All Voting is Local, a voting rights advocacy group. "I am of the view that it is a mixed bag."

For this recipe, we're going to start by subtracting a key ingredient: polling places, the number of which has been declining in recent years. In 2018, there were more than 200,000 polling places in use, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. In 2020, that was down to just over 132,000, and in 2022 it was fewer than 95,000. Polling place closures often disproportionately impact areas with high concentrations of voters of color, can lead to longer wait times and can even decrease turnout.

Now let's add a healthy dollop of in-person Election Day voting, which has rebounded after the pandemic. In 2020, 43 percent of voters cast their ballot by mail, and an additional 26 percent voted early in person, according to data from MIT's Survey of the Performance of American Elections. In the 2022 midterms, a plurality of voters (50 percent) returned to voting in person on Election Day: Just 32 percent voted by mail and 18 percent voted early in person. Voting by mail continues to be more widespread than it was a decade ago, but it has reverted to the trajectory it was on before the pandemic.

Part of the reason for this is practical — with most Americans no longer concerned about COVID-19, the prospect of voting in person on Election Day is more palatable, and it's the preferred method for many voters. But another part of the reason is bureaucratic. Many jurisdictions that expanded access to early or mail-in voting during the pandemic ended up rolling back those expansions after 2020.

For example, most states allow voters to cast an absentee ballot without providing a reason (or simply conduct elections entirely by mail). But at the start of 2020, 16 states still required an excuse to vote absentee, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures. For that year's election, 14 of those states changed the rules to allow for no-excuse absentee voting, but only one (Virginia) ended up making this change permanent. The rest have reverted to requiring an excuse to vote absentee, meaning most voters in those states will need to cast a ballot in person once again.

The next ingredient is an absolutely heaping cup of new voting restrictions, which have been enacted in many, mostly Republican-controlled states in the years since the 2020 election. States removed ballot drop boxes, shortened polling place hours, introduced new ID laws, even banned individuals from giving out food or water to voters waiting in long lines. To name just a few headline moments: Texas enacted a sweeping voter restriction bill, Georgia banned mobile voting vans and Ohio introduced one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country.

Voters in North Carolina will also be required to show a photo ID for the first time in a presidential election this fall. There, "citizens are going to see a literal increase in the difficulty [of] voting," said Michael Pomante, a political scientist at Jacksonville University who produces a cost of voting index each election to gauge the difficulty of voting in each state. "Every citizen that goes to vote will notice that difference."

Finally, add a few scoops of voter enthusiasm that could portend high or even record levels of turnout. With Vice President Kamala Harris now at the top of the Democratic ticket, enthusiasm from voters across the political spectrum has risen. In a recent Gallup poll, 69 percent of U.S. adults said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting, the highest level since the pollster started asking the question in 2000. Of course, reported enthusiasm alone doesn't necessarily translate into higher voter turnout, but turnout has been historically high since former President Donald Trump took office, and if nothing else, voter enthusiasm doesn't give us any signal that turnout would drastically drop.

All of these ingredients combined could make it harder for voters to cast their ballots. Imagine you voted by mail in 2020, only to find out you have to vote in person in 2024 because your state got rid of no-excuse absentee voting. You then learn the local polling place has closed, and your new polling station is farther away. Then, when you get there, after waiting in line for an hour, you discover you don't have the newly-necessary ID to cast your ballot. Voters could easily wind up with a bad taste in their mouth.

But not all the changes since 2020 make it harder to vote. Many states have expanded voter access or kept pandemic-era changes that made it easier to cast a ballot. Voters in Michigan, for example, passed a state constitutional amendment to guarantee access to early voting and drop boxes, and Nevada made universal vote by mail, which it piloted in 2020, permanent.

But the potential for the disaster scenario is still worrying because of the high stakes. With Republicans already laying out plans to potentially challenge or delay the certification of results, problems at the polls on Election Day could be wielded, unfactually, as evidence by Trump and others that widespread fraud has occurred.

"The message, really, for election officials is to prepare expansively," Fried said. "The end result here is that these elections will get certified. It's just a question of how painful some folks want to make it in the process."

Compared with the 2020 election, conducted at the height of the pandemic, this year's election may feel like it will finally be a return to normal. But when mixed together, the new ingredients that will make up the voting process this year could leave voters with a whole new level of indigestion.