Partisanship is why people vote in person in a pandemic

Objective The choice of voting methods has increasingly become a politicized, partisan issue. We ask: Can a nationalized partisan rhetoric cast doubt on vote‐by‐mail (VBM) despite years of experience and a raging pandemic? Method Using 2020 general election records in Colorado, an established all‐mail voting state, we analyze first the general choice of voting methods using supervised machine learning and then the choice to switch to in‐person voting despite having used VBM in previous cycles. Results The choice of voting modes is mainly habitual; local variations of COVID‐19 hardly mattered. Republican partisanship played an important role in predicting “switchers” to in‐person voting; the probability was 5.2 percent conditional on being a Republican as opposed to 1.9 percent for a Democrat. Conclusions The results suggest that voting in person can be heavily polarized by partisan communication, despite being a health behavior in a pandemic and voters having experience with mail voting.