The challenge in trying to evaluate the impact of vote at home on turnout is that there’s never a control group. Turnout rates in the states where everyone can vote at home — Oregon, Washington and Colorado — have increased since the system was adopted, and they’re now among the highest in the country. But because elections are complicated, and each state’s demographics are unique, it’s hard to prove that vote at home is the cause.

So Pantheon Analytics did the next best thing. The firm looked at voter files — the records of individual voters kept by state elections officials — in Colorado in 2014 and compared them with the predictions of a respected voter turnout model created by the Democratic-leaning consulting firm Clarity Campaign Labs. Turnout models use publicly available voter file information — age, sex, voting history — combined with consumer data to generate a probability score for each registered voter.

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....Vote at home clearly seems to have pushed young people and infrequent voters into the electorate — exactly what our ailing system needs. Democrats should be fighting tooth and nail to get it implemented wherever possible. But the partisanship results are hazy enough that Republicans shouldn’t be too scared: It looks like these low-frequency voters tend to be less partisan and therefore more up for grabs.

Besides, boosting turnout in lower-profile elections would be good for the long-term health of both parties. Low turnout may help Republican candidates prevail in general elections, but it also empowers the right-wing fringe, leading to a party that, once in power, is incapable of governing — as the GOP’s inability to prevent a shutdown, despite unified control of the federal government, recently illustrated.