Emiliano Aguilar

Since the 1980s, an increasing number of voters in each election have chosen to cast their ballots before Election Day, taking advantage of the opportunity to vote absentee. This form of early voting, often conducted by mail, varies by state but has become a focal point of controversy surrounding election integrity. Through a series of state-specific case studies, Aguilar's book project Absentee investigates how political parties, candidates, and voters turned to absentee ballots both as a tool to expand democracy and as the vehicle for its corruption. Each chapter will explore an element of the contested expansion and contraction of absentee voting rooted in themes of space, race, and citizenship from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first, arguing that absentee ballots served as the foundational battleground through which we can trace the history of increasingly polarized electoral contests. The book will provide an overview of the origins and subsequent developments surrounding the ballot, which include access by transient populations, the mentally infirm, rural, incarcerated, and immigrant communities. Despite their foundational role in the inflated and unfounded theories of pervasive voter fraud, there is little work historicizing this popular form of voting. This research will offer significant value to our understanding of how people engage in everyday democratic practices and how they organize to collectively expand or restrict those practices for others. Finally, by embracing our multiracial democracy, Absentee highlights the complexities of these battles at the core of our democracy’s litmus test, ones that extend across a variety of demographics.