The political consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic seem as unpredictable as the virus itself and potentially monumental as the financial losses it causes. Although the November election is still almost five months away, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading the call for states to make mail-in voting mandatory, ostensibly in the interest of public safety.
Some – including the always vocal President Donald Trump – see mandatory mail-in voting as a recipe for widespread voter fraud. No wonder those who argue favor of these voting changes condemns warnings against mail-in voting as false and a thinly veiled ruse designed to achieve opponents’ “real” motives: voter disenfranchisement. In fact, it has opened a fresh front in the ongoing social media battles between Trump and the left. Twitter has finally bowed to pressure to “fact-check” Trump’s tweets, starting with his recent tweet about voter fraud. (No word yet on whether they will fact-check tweets from former President Barack Obama, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, or tweets from mainstream media outlets.)
Supporters of the fresh voting methods downplay cases of voter fraud, saying they are so scarce that they are irrelevant. However, there is ample evidence that voter fraud is quite common and significant.
Even a compact number of illegally cast or uncounted votes can have earnest consequences. Consider that the 2000 presidential election was decided by the electors of the state of Florida; George W. Bush won Florida (and therefore the presidency) by just 537 votes out of 6 million cast in the state. This margin may be unusual for national elections, but state and local elections are often decided by a compact number of votes; for example, in the years 2013–2017 in 86 elections in the state of Ohio they decided one vote.
Moreover, the numbers are not always compact; a 1982 Justice Department investigation revealed that more than 100,000 fraudulent votes were cast in the Chicago election.
It is also not true that cases of electoral fraud are few. The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of nearly 1,300 confirmed cases of voter fraud, including those that resulted in convictions, prison terms and invalidated elections. And of course, many cases simply go undetected or unreported.
Voter fraud can take many forms, including impersonation or identity theft, false registration, double voting and unauthorized voting (e.g. foreigners). Voter fraud is also possible with inadequate chain of custody procedures, and ballot harvesting has raised this concern. Ballot harvesting, a process that allows people to collect other voters’ ballots and turn them in, captured the nation’s attention during the 2018 election when seven Southern California precincts flipped from the Republican to the Democratic Party.After Election day, when the collected ballots were cast and counted.
Ballot harvesting is legal in 27 states and Washington, D.C., but California’s law is the most indulgent. California’s 2016 ballot harvesting law has few supply chain control protections and no limits on who can collect ballots or the number of ballots. Data on the number of votes cast in this way is also not collected.
Any voting process without adequate measures to ensure that all votes are received, authenticated and counted will be postponed lost votes as well as potentially false votes. The history of mail-in voting – an vital solution for our military and other Americans living abroad – is replete with examples. The Public Interest Law Foundation (PILF) released a study last month showing that in just the last 10 years 28 million mail-in ballots have been lost or misdirected. PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams warns that expanding mail-in voting in response to the coronavirus is a disaster waiting to happen. “The most common phenomenon is mail-in voting fraud, which is the most expensive to investigate and can never be reversed after the election,” he says. “The status quo was already unfavorable for postal voting. The proposed fallback solution is worse.”
Jessica Huseman of ProPublica agrees: “(S)reluctant state and county government actions, inconsistent state laws and limited resources… could make it difficult to expand nationwide and reach more than 200 million registered voters in the November general election. ..There is bipartisan agreement that absentee ballots are the form of voting most vulnerable to fraud.”
Even in-person voting is fair game in the event of fraud when rules are changed to allow same-day registration and voting, or when voting is allowed without photo ID. But photo ID is probably the voting integrity measure that attracts the loudest opposition. Democrats routinely oppose photo ID laws, arguing that voting is too significant a right to be subject to such restrictions and that photo ID laws impermissibly discriminate against minorities, the elderly and the homeless.
In the age of Covid-19, the hypocrisy of this argument becomes clear. I searched for states that have imposed photo ID requirements for Covid-19 testing and found many, including California, Florida, Kentucky, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas , Washington, Washington and DC. Wisconsin. Not only are such tests often a matter of life and death, but populations that have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus also include minorities, the elderly and the homeless.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, only five states – Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Hawaii – required mail-in voting (“mandatory” means that all voters automatically received mail-in ballots in every election). However, other states are now considering changes in airy of the virus.
It’s impossible to know this in advance How universal postal voting will be used without adequate measures to ensure voting integrity, but history shows that where such opportunities exist, they are not sufficient will be be exploited. Contrary to what the media narrative says, this is the so-called lack appropriate vote integrity measures that actually disenfranchise voters by diluting or invalidating their votes.
Covid-19 has stolen enough from us already. We cannot allow our votes and our voices to be stolen.
