Study after study shows there’s no evidence of significant widespread voter fraud or security issues associated with vote-by-mail. Most recently, a
Washington Post and Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) analysis of three vote-by-mail states found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of improper voting out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.
The reason that there are so few examples of improper voting (someone voting twice, filling out a ballot for someone else, etc.) is that states, especially those who have a long history of voting by mail, have established strong safeguards to prevent it. Here are a few simple but important security measures that make it exceedingly difficult for election fraud to occur.
The most common way to ensure absentee ballots are coming from the intended voter is
signature verification. Before you mail in or drop off your ballot, you have to sign the ballot envelope. That signature is then closely examined by
election officials, trained by experts, to see if it matches your signature on file. If a potential issue is identified, the elections office will contact you to attempt to fix the issue, usually by confirming you cast your ballot and then verifying the information. If the issue is resolved, the vote counts; if it isn’t, it’s not counted.
Most election jurisdictions also use some form of
bar codes on ballots for tracking. Each voter has their own unique bar code, and when yours is submitted and scanned, it’s tracked in the system and you can’t cast another ballot for that election. In some places, there’s also a notification system where the voter can track their ballot from beginning to end, which not only reminds the voter about upcoming elections, but helps to identify any issues that might occur. For example, if you got a notification that your ballot had been received and counted but you hadn’t actually filled it out yourself, you could report it and fix the issue.
There are myriad other physical security measures election officials take, including 24-hour surveillance of ballot dropboxes, mandating that no one can be alone with ballots at any time and establishing a clear chain of custody for all ballots. A recent John Oliver “Last Week Tonight”
segment succinctly illustrates just how difficult voter fraud would be to pull off.
Again, we know that these security measures work. Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii -- states that have a long history of all-mail elections -- haven’t seen any significant fraud. Oregon, which started running its elections by mail in 1993, has had just 82 felony convictions under its election statutes between 1990 and 2019.
