Is voting by mail secure? Politicians, experts, and probably all of your neighbors are talking about mail-in voting and whether or not it's a safe and effective way to vote. Voting by mail began during the Civil War when both Union and Confederate soldiers could cast ballots in their home states from their distant battlefields.
"It's been sort of part and parcel of elections. We've for a very long time, especially uniform and overseas voters that allowed and opened the door for really a lot of expansions in regular voters, moving to vote by mail," Lonna Atkeson said.
Voting by mail has since come a long way. Accounting for 25% of total votes in 2016, currently, five states have mail-in voting for all elections, opponents of mail-in voting point to double counting or voting on behalf of deceased people. But a recent Washington Post study of three-vote-by-mail states found just 372 possible cases where this happened. That's a fraction of the 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general election. Fraud certainly is possible, but it's not nearly as widespread as some, make it out to be.
"It's a constant tension in election administration between security and access. So the more accessible we make the system the more opportunity there is for fraud. I don't think it is widespread. I don't think there are massive amounts of mail fraud going on, but to say there's no fraud in the system is also disingenuous," Atkeson said.
As far as the large scale foreign attempts at the vote by mail fraud, the FBI has recently stated that they have not seen a coordinated fraud effort and noted how difficult such an effort would be considering the decentralized nature of U.S. elections. However, professor Atkesson does believe the rush to expand mail and voting this year could make the system more vulnerable.
"So this really shifts things in a way that's not typical. And so, you know, we were going to expect later ballots. We've seen that many ballots in these places have gone uncounted. There have been delivery problems of ballots to the voter, as well as back to the election official. So, in States that have this down, it's not a problem, but in states that aren't used to it, it's really a big change," Atkeson said.
Even with those concerns. Professor Atkeson believes mail-in voting is a good option this year due to COVID-19.
"The circumstances are such that we should all vote by mail as much as possible. I mean, the system is very strong, really. Election officials work to make sure there's integrity to the system. We have to look at this as a single moment where we have to bend our system because of the circumstances. And then we need to go back and let states evolve naturally into processes that make sense for their voters," Atkeson said.
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