A look at the debate over mail-in voting for November's elections
WASHINGTON — For months President Donald Trump has railed against mail-in voting, claiming efforts to expand access to absentee ballots because of COVID-19 will lead to widespread fraud. But leading election security experts contend it’s unlikely the president’s claims will materialize, in part because of long-standing safeguards in place.
Trump, who has voted by mail three times in the last three years, has stepped up his attacks on universal mail-in voting as more Americans than ever are expected to vote by mail this November. He has demanded that states that plan on mailing ballots to all registered voters — including New Jersey, Nevada and California — reverse their plans, insisting that voters should be required to request absentee ballots from their local election board.
The president and his campaign have offered conflicting messages on mail-in voting — with Trump arguing an expansion will lead to “massive fraud and abuse,” while his campaign has encouraged supporters in ads and robocalls to trust mail-in voting as “a safe and secure way to guarantee your voice is heard.”
Election security experts contend that while there have been highly publicized cases of fraud involving mail-in voting, those cases generally highlight that systems put in place to detect fraud are working.
“Both mail-in voting and in-person voting have risks, but those risks can be managed,” said Jennifer Morrell, an elections security consultant with the firm The Elections Group. “Just like we have various policies and procedures around in-person voting, we have similar policies, procedures and controls around the mail-in ballot process that build layers of safeguards to defend the process from manipulation.”
How secure is mail-in-voting?
How secure is mail-in-voting?
Multiple studies have indicated that cases of mail-in voting fraud are rare, and election security experts note that the process of counting mail-in ballots comes with various steps aimed at tracking a ballot from the moment it is sent to voters to the moment it's returned to election officials.
“Mail-in and absentee voting systems are resilient and secure because they generate paper trails that can be audited,” said Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a recent interview with the technology news outlet CNET. “If you're able to detect any sort of anomaly or something seems out of the ordinary, you want to be able to roll back the tape, and if you've got paper, you've got receipts. So you can build back up to what the accurate count is."
Five states that have held elections exclusively by mail for years before the pandemic — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — have reported a small percentage of possible fraudulent cases.
A Washington Post analysis of votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections in three vote-by-mail states identified 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of a deceased person, out of 14.6 million ballots cast, or 0.0025 percent.
A database of voter fraud cases compiled by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, shows there have been 204 incidents of voter fraud involving absentee ballots over the past 20 years.
An exhaustive review of state election records from 2000 to 2012 by The Voting Rights Project at Arizona State University identified 491 cases of potential absentee ballot fraud across the United States, but found “few cases reveal a coordinated effort to change election results.”
Trump has frequently pointed to cases of absentee voter fraud in Paterson, New Jersey, and in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race to make the case that fraud will be widespread in November. But election security experts say those cases show that safeguards to protect the integrity of the voting process were effective in detecting those acts of fraud.
In the Paterson case, three men, including a city council candidate, were charged earlier this year with fraud for violating state rules that limited the amount of absentee ballots a person can turn in on behalf of voters seeking assistance with mailing in their ballots. In North Carolina, a congressional election was invalidated after investigators determined that a Republican campaign operative coordinated an effort to collect absentee ballots from voters and fill them out in violation of state law.
Is there evidence that foreign actors will look to distribute counterfeit ballots?
Is there evidence that foreign actors will look to distribute counterfeit ballots?
Trump has claimed on Twitter that “millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries and others,” but senior U.S. officials, including Attorney General Bill Barr, have asserted that there is no intelligence pointing to such a scheme and election security experts have noted that local election boards have various layers to protect against counterfeit ballots.
Barr in recent interviews with CNN and NPR repeated Trump’s claim that foreign actors will seek to distribute fake ballots, but when asked if he could point to evidence to support the claims, Barr told CNN he was “basing it on logic.”
Senior administration officials in a conference call with reporters last month said there was no intelligence pointing to a widespread counterfeiting plan, and election law experts have noted the difficulty of creating counterfeit ballots given the safeguards embedded into the design of the mail-in-ballots from bar codes to the grade of paper used for each ballot and envelopes.
Election security experts say there are several hurdles to creating a counterfeit ballot, including the sheer number of distinct ballots given the country’s decentralized voting system.
“You can’t just print out a single ballot for the entire U.S.,” said Michael McDonald, a political-science professor at the University of Florida specializing in election laws. “No two localities have the same ballot because local offices appearing on it are different.”
Assuming a foreign actor wanted to target a single precinct they would “need to hijack a ballot and be able to mass print the ballot and two return envelopes (the return envelope and the inner privacy envelope),” said McDonald.
“Suppose that you perfectly recreate the three pieces of paper, including bar coding on the exterior unique to each voter? Next, you have to know who hasn’t requested and returned a ballot yet. It is going to be strange when two ballots from the same person show up at election offices,” McDonald said. “Which ballot is the real ballot? There is a signature on the outside return envelope to compare against. Election officials will figure out something is afoot pretty quickly. This is why it is easy for election officials to detect ham-handed attempts like making ballot copies.”
Is it illegal to cast both an absentee ballot and vote in-person?
Is it illegal to cast both an absentee ballot and vote in-person?
Trump has suggested that voters should vote twice — in person and by mail — to test the integrity of mail-in voting.
Intentionally voting twice is illegal in most states, but New York law has allowed voters to overrule their absentee ballot for decades.
The State Board of Elections in a statement Thursday said: “Even if you request or cast and return an absentee ballot, you may still go to the polls and vote in person. The election law recognizes that plans change."
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