Last week, during a White House press briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump answered a question from a reporter who suggested that all of the states should move toward mail-in (or “absentee”) voting in the upcoming primary and general elections.
The President pushed back strongly: “It shouldn’t be mail-in voting. … You don’t send it in the mail where people pick up—all sorts of bad thing can happen … by the time it gets in and is tabulated. No, it shouldn’t be mailed in. You should vote at the booth. And you should have voter ID, because when you have voter ID, that’s the real deal.”
President Trump was absolutely right to highlight the dangers of mail-in voting. Compared to in-person voting with photo ID, the opportunities for voter fraud are much greater. Three forms of fraud occur wherever mail-in voting is allowed.
1. Double voting. During my two terms as Kansas Secretary of State, I was the only secretary of state in the country with the power to prosecute election crimes. The most frequent form of voter fraud that my office prosecuted was double-voting—in which the voter votes in two or more states, usually through mail-in voting. It occurs with shocking frequency. Indeed, a 2017 study looking at just 21 states revealed that approximately 8,400 people had double-voted in the 2016 election.
2. Ballot harvesting. Mail-in voting also facilitates a second form of fraud: ballot harvesting—a form of fraud whereby someone purporting to deliver the completed ballots on behalf of voters only delivers those ballots believed to favor a particular candidate. The country was introduced to ballot harvesting on the national stage in 2018 when the Mark Harris v. Dan McCready race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District was in question for months, due to credible allegations that a contractor working for the Harris campaign had engaged in ballot harvesting.
As I wrote at the time, because the victim of the fraud was the Democrat, Nancy Pelosi suddenly changed her tune on the subject. She went from mocking allegations of voter fraud to describing just how significant the problem of voter fraud is: “This is bigger than that one seat. This is about undermining the integrity of our elections. … What was done there was so remarkable, in that that person, those entities, got away with that.” Now she seems to have forgotten her own words on the subject.
3. Falsely voting another person’s ballot. A third form of fraud through mail-in voting occurs when someone fraudulently requests another person’s mail-in ballot. The fraudster then intercepts the ballot at the real voter’s mailbox, or he has the ballot sent to a phony address. He can then fraudulently vote the ballot and send it in.
Alternatively, this form of fraud can be used without intercepting the ballot. The fraudster simply requests mail-in ballots for others to increase voter turnout in certain neighborhoods. Before I became Kansas Secretary of State, this form of fraud occurred more than 50 times in urban Wyandotte County, Kansas. It stopped when I introduced mail-in ballot security reforms to Kansas law. More on that below.
All three of these forms of fraud occur in the vast majority of states, which allow voters to choose to vote by mail. All except Kansas, that is, where two out of the three problems have been solved by the security reforms that I drafted and the Kansas Legislature enacted in 2011.
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