Here’s who is mostly likely to vote by mail

By Amy O’Kruk, Rhyannon Bartlett-Imadegawa, CNN

(CNN) — Mail-in voting in the 2026 midterm elections is underway following weeks of legal fighting over the Trump administration’s effort to change how ballots are sent to voters.

Most recently, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s plan, which would have given the US Postal Service unprecedented power to withhold potentially millions of mail ballots.

Voting by mail has grown significantly and has become a popular and well-established part of US elections over the past two decades. States set their own rules for who can vote by mail, creating a patchwork of policies that has shifted considerably over the past two decades.

In 2000, 21 states allowed any voter to cast a ballot by mail. Today, 37 states and the District of Columbia do, while another 13 states offer mail voting with some restrictions, according to the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

As access to mail voting has expanded, so has the annual number of ballots cast. Mail voting surged during the pandemic-era 2020 election, and millions of Americans have continued to cast their ballots by mail in federal elections.

Any changes to how mail ballots are handled could have implications for tens of millions of voters and for election officials preparing to administer voting.

Voters who said they used mail-in ballots in 2024 tended to be older and more likely to live in urban or suburban settings compared to the overall voting population, according to a 2024 post-election survey by Pew Research Center.

In some states like Mississippi, voters can qualify for a mail-in ballot based on being aged 65 or over.

Political preferences differ between people who vote by mail and people who vote in person, the same Pew survey suggests.

In 2024, 61% of voters who reported voting by mail-in ballot said they supported Kamala Harris for president, a higher share than those who voted in person, both early or on Election Day. The Harris support among mail-in voters was higher than her share of the popular vote.

Trump’s March order aiming to rein in mail-in voting follows years of him making unsubstantiated claims about illegal voting by mail.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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