Mail-in voting is as old as the Civil War, but of course, back then, you needed an excuse to avoid Election Day furor. As liberal states and progressive organizations began a concerted effort to push state legislatures to allow no-excuse mail-in voting, so did efforts to create robust voter contact operations that would allow Democrats to make frequent contact with mail-in voters to ensure that their ballot is banked into the system in a process called “ballot chasing.” The result was a huge advantage over Republicans in pre-Election Day voting. In 2022, Republicans captured a mere 33.8 percent of early votes, the percentage drops when you look at strictly mail-in ballots.