You are assuming people would wait until the mandate was in effect to change behavior rather than for example buying masks in preparation for a mandate.

So your contention would be that people will wear masks even when they are not mandated? I would agree that could happen.

But then, that’s not a result of masks being mandated, is it?

No. I am saying if you create a mandate on date X, people will prepare for it before it comes into effect.

Yes, lots of things happen before and after lots of other things. But figuring out causes is a lot harder than saying something happened after something else.

Regardless, if people are willing to voluntarily wear masks before they are required, like you claim, then one thing is clear: Masks do not need to be mandatory for people to wear them. Imagine if they dropped the speed limit from 70 to 50. How many people would start driving 50 a week early to "prepare"? Not many. If people are so resistant to an idea that it has to be mandated for them to do it, then they aren't going to suddenly do it before it is mandatory. And if they aren't resistant to it, then it won't take a mandate.

In theory you might be right, but we don’t have to guess people have collected actually evidence.

Also, you can’t fake the response from an impending mandate without a mandate. Most people fill out their taxes early, but if taxes were optional then nobody would be filling them out. The test would simply be to look up when a mandate was announced and then when it took effect.

The supposed "actual evidence" is what we are arguing about right now.

At the end of May, the places that would institute a mask mandate two months later fell below the other places. Then they stayed below the other places. Attributing that to the mandates is bordering on absurdity. We aren't talking about a week. We're talking about two months. That's long before people are preparing for a mandate that nobody is even considering yet.

You might as well say, "Places that will eventually have mask mandates have higher infection rates two months prior to the mandates."

I don’t think anyone was suggesting that, the masked line was above the masked line in the article but that’s summing data across multiple sources and mask mandates that took place at different times.

Look at the underlying data for each mandate in the state and things become much more obvious.