A new mail-voting exhibition is a reminder that its use dates back to the Civil War

Four years ago, millions more voters in the U.S. became familiar with voting by mail.

But a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum opens Saturday as a reminder that earlier generations of voters used the postal service to cast absentee ballots decades before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2020 election.

“It was sort of presented during the pandemic as a new concept for a lot of folks who may have never encountered it before,” says Carrie Villar, director of curatorial affairs at the Washington, D.C., museum that is open free to the public. “We thought with this presidential election coming up in 2024, there could be no better place than the National Postal Museum to have an exhibit where we talk about voting by mail and how it's not a new thing. It's been around for over 160 years in various forms.”

On a wall nestled within the museum’s stamp salon, Villar’s team of curators has assembled a small selection of mail-in ballot envelopes, election mailers, photographs and other artifacts to lay out a timeline that begins with the Civil War election of 1864, which is considered the start of large-scale use of voting by mail in the United States.

“That was the big moment that voting by mail stepped up to a national stage,” Villar says, noting that there were earlier examples at the state and local levels dating back to the 18th century.

Villar hopes the exhibition can be expanded one day with more artifacts to fill in gaps in its presentation of mail-in voting’s extensive history.

Visitors, for example, won’t find any items on display that represent the spread of baseless claims of widespread absentee ballot fraud during the 2020 election, or how those allegations have fueled distrust of the voting