Though the coronavirus pandemic rages on, attacks on mail-in voting from all sides have led to more people planning to cast their vote in person than expected, raising fears that safety and efficiency may be compromised.
A poll from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist shows that half of all voters now plan to vote in person on Election Day, while only 35% said they would vote by mail. This is down from the 50% of voters who said in May they planned to vote by mail.
Advocates of mail-in voting worry that more voters choosing to head to the polls will lead to overcrowding and a lack of available poll workers.
"This is swinging the pendulum back too far," Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona election official and a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, told NPR. "If we flood our in-person voting facilities, in the middle of a global pandemic, that is the recipe for some true chaos."
President Donald Trump has consistently claimed that mail-in voting could lead to voter fraud, as the U.S. Postal Service won't be able to handle the large influx of ballots. He continued this insistence at the first presidential debate against Democrat Joe Biden.
While Democrats initially urged people to vote by mail, they have increasingly promoted in-person voting over the last month.
After reports of postal delays and high-profile congressional hearings involving Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, Democrats seem to be more worried about the security of mail-in voting. Earlier in the summer, 60% of Democrats said they were planning to vote by mail, but now, only half say the same.
Despite their concerns, voters may end up casting their ballots by mail at a higher rate than polls would predict anyway. Nonpartisan data firm Citizen Data projects that this is likely to happen as voters learn of the relative ease of mail-in voting.
The uncertainty is keeping election administrators guessing.
"I would like November to be something like 30% [by mail], because I think that that will help alleviate congestion at the polling places," Brianna Lennon, the county clerk of Boone County, Missouri, said to NPR. "But I don't know right now whether we're going to get there or not."
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