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Cort Ammon
Cort Ammon
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I think it depends on your definition. Its trivial to see that mail in ballots make it easier to do vote selling or vote coercion. The party doing the buying or coercion can watch you vote and watch you put it in the mailbox. They cannot do so in an anonymous voting booth. So, from that perspective, you can argue that yes indeed it can increase voter fraud.

As a simple theoretical approach, I point out that any safeguards you use which protect mail-in ballots can be applied to voting done in a controlled area. If there is a secure way to do mail-in, it can simply be applied to the voting booth.

The tricky thing about such claims is that voter fraud at the national level is basically a non issue. There is no evidence that national level voter fraud occured at a scale that could change an election in the history of the US. To get a sense of the scale of voter fraud, The Heritage Fountain compiled a list of known voter fraud occurances. They tabulate 1,290 cases of voter fraud in the last 20 years. Even the famously contentious race between Clinton and Trump in 2016 had a popular-vote difference of nearly 3 million votes. For voter fraud to have changed the result of that close election, it would have to be something like 10,000 times more rampant than it has ever been in the history of the United States. (and it would have to be one sided. Voter fraud on both sides would cancel each other out)

Voter fraud is a much bigger issue on small scales, such as mayoral elections, where influencing a few hundred or a few thousand people can indeed change the result of an election. At the national level, it is generally agreed that voter fraud is a boogeyman, intended to scare people into behaviors that support one's particular cause.

So we can argue that there's a reasonable path to voter fraud increasing due to mail in ballots. However, to argue that it could occur in sufficient magnitude to materially affect an election is pretty much absurd, so one should really look at "unintended" consequences, such as disenfranchisement issues. Given how small of an issue voter fraud is, a slight increase in disenfranchisement would have a materially larger effect on the democracy.

I think it depends on your definition. Its trivial to see that mail in ballots make it easier to do vote selling or vote coercion. The party doing the buying or coercion can watch you vote and watch you put it in the mailbox. They cannot do so in an anonymous voting booth. So, from that perspective, you can argue that yes indeed it can increase voter fraud.

The tricky thing about such claims is that voter fraud at the national level is basically a non issue. There is no evidence that national level voter fraud occured at a scale that could change an election in the history of the US. To get a sense of the scale of voter fraud, The Heritage Fountain compiled a list of known voter fraud occurances. They tabulate 1,290 cases of voter fraud in the last 20 years. Even the famously contentious race between Clinton and Trump in 2016 had a popular-vote difference of nearly 3 million votes. For voter fraud to have changed the result of that close election, it would have to be something like 10,000 times more rampant than it has ever been in the history of the United States. (and it would have to be one sided. Voter fraud on both sides would cancel each other out)

Voter fraud is a much bigger issue on small scales, such as mayoral elections, where influencing a few hundred or a few thousand people can indeed change the result of an election. At the national level, it is generally agreed that voter fraud is a boogeyman, intended to scare people into behaviors that support one's particular cause.

So we can argue that there's a reasonable path to voter fraud increasing due to mail in ballots. However, to argue that it could occur in sufficient magnitude to materially affect an election is pretty much absurd, so one should really look at "unintended" consequences, such as disenfranchisement issues. Given how small of an issue voter fraud is, a slight increase in disenfranchisement would have a materially larger effect on the democracy.

I think it depends on your definition. Its trivial to see that mail in ballots make it easier to do vote selling or vote coercion. The party doing the buying or coercion can watch you vote and watch you put it in the mailbox. They cannot do so in an anonymous voting booth. So, from that perspective, you can argue that yes indeed it can increase voter fraud.

As a simple theoretical approach, I point out that any safeguards you use which protect mail-in ballots can be applied to voting done in a controlled area. If there is a secure way to do mail-in, it can simply be applied to the voting booth.

The tricky thing about such claims is that voter fraud at the national level is basically a non issue. There is no evidence that national level voter fraud occured at a scale that could change an election in the history of the US. To get a sense of the scale of voter fraud, The Heritage Fountain compiled a list of known voter fraud occurances. They tabulate 1,290 cases of voter fraud in the last 20 years. Even the famously contentious race between Clinton and Trump in 2016 had a popular-vote difference of nearly 3 million votes. For voter fraud to have changed the result of that close election, it would have to be something like 10,000 times more rampant than it has ever been in the history of the United States. (and it would have to be one sided. Voter fraud on both sides would cancel each other out)

Voter fraud is a much bigger issue on small scales, such as mayoral elections, where influencing a few hundred or a few thousand people can indeed change the result of an election. At the national level, it is generally agreed that voter fraud is a boogeyman, intended to scare people into behaviors that support one's particular cause.

So we can argue that there's a reasonable path to voter fraud increasing due to mail in ballots. However, to argue that it could occur in sufficient magnitude to materially affect an election is pretty much absurd, so one should really look at "unintended" consequences, such as disenfranchisement issues. Given how small of an issue voter fraud is, a slight increase in disenfranchisement would have a materially larger effect on the democracy.

Source Link
Cort Ammon
Cort Ammon
  • 1.5k
  • 11
  • 14

I think it depends on your definition. Its trivial to see that mail in ballots make it easier to do vote selling or vote coercion. The party doing the buying or coercion can watch you vote and watch you put it in the mailbox. They cannot do so in an anonymous voting booth. So, from that perspective, you can argue that yes indeed it can increase voter fraud.

The tricky thing about such claims is that voter fraud at the national level is basically a non issue. There is no evidence that national level voter fraud occured at a scale that could change an election in the history of the US. To get a sense of the scale of voter fraud, The Heritage Fountain compiled a list of known voter fraud occurances. They tabulate 1,290 cases of voter fraud in the last 20 years. Even the famously contentious race between Clinton and Trump in 2016 had a popular-vote difference of nearly 3 million votes. For voter fraud to have changed the result of that close election, it would have to be something like 10,000 times more rampant than it has ever been in the history of the United States. (and it would have to be one sided. Voter fraud on both sides would cancel each other out)

Voter fraud is a much bigger issue on small scales, such as mayoral elections, where influencing a few hundred or a few thousand people can indeed change the result of an election. At the national level, it is generally agreed that voter fraud is a boogeyman, intended to scare people into behaviors that support one's particular cause.

So we can argue that there's a reasonable path to voter fraud increasing due to mail in ballots. However, to argue that it could occur in sufficient magnitude to materially affect an election is pretty much absurd, so one should really look at "unintended" consequences, such as disenfranchisement issues. Given how small of an issue voter fraud is, a slight increase in disenfranchisement would have a materially larger effect on the democracy.