What is the evidence for postal ballot fraud?

@indexer (4852)
Leicester, England
May 27, 2020 9:22am CST
Donald Trump is convinced that voting by post is a recipe for electoral fraud. But on what is he basing this claim? Studies have been made that looked into the safety of postal voting and have revealed very little such evidence - certainly no more such fraud has emerged than has come from studies of "regular" voting. I am not aware of the processes used in the United States for conducting postal voting, but I do know something about how this is done in the UK. I regularly count ballot papers after elections and have done so for several years - the elections being for all levels of national and local government representatives. Great care is taken to ensure that fraud does not occur. You have to be on the electoral register to have a vote, whether you vote in person or by post. If you apply to vote by post this is marked on the voters' list that the polling clerk will have at the polling station, so you cannot record both a postal and a personal vote. You can, however, hand in a postal vote at the polling station if you have been unable to post it in time. Your postal vote will only be accepted if it is submitted in an official marked envelope, so it is impossible for voting papers to be copied and submitted multiple times - which is one of Donald Trump's claims. The completed ballot paper is sealed in an envelope that is then placed inside a second envelope that will contain the voter's declaration and bear the official address. All the envelopes are opened by officials prior to polling day and checked carefully for any sign of cheating - e.g. by matching the number on the paper's counterfoil with that on the electoral register, which is what is also done with non-postal votes. The only way I know in which a postal vote might not be genuine is when a postal address has a number of voters resident at it. There is nothing to stop one member of the household collecting and returning all the ballot papers, although this will mean lying in terms of the personal declaration that the voter is required to sign before submitting the vote. I know that this does happen in Leicester - the city in which I help to count the votes - because the head of the household may well vote on behalf of his wife and all his adult children living under the same roof. This is common practice in some patriarchal societies who are well represented in the city. However, with this one exception - which only happens in certain isolated pockets of the population - the chances for electoral fraud are extremely limited. They are, moreover, far outweighed by the voting opportunities offered to housebound people and others who know that they will be away from home on polling day.
1 person likes this
No responses