Perceptions and Reality of Vote-by-Mail

Despite the hardships of holding a presidential election during a global pandemic, many voters in the U.S. have a safe option for casting a ballot: mail-in voting. However, a recent NBC News poll showed only 45% of the U.S. population have confidence that all votes will be counted accurately. Many people’s concerns stem from fears of mail-in ballots and accompanying perceptions of voter fraud.

In fact, mail-in ballots are a secure and long-standing feature of our democracy. They date to the U.S. Civil War, when soldiers far from their districts voted absentee. Outside the White House in 1864, President Lincoln proclaimed, “We can not have free government without elections […] if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”

Eighty years later, during World War II, not only did all states allow their soldiers to participate in elections remotely, but the U.S. military was in charge of delivering 3.2 million absentee ballots, almost 7% of the total electorate in the 1944 presidential election.

Statewide vote-by-mail efforts for local and special elections began in the 1980s. The 2000 election marked the start of some states opting for all-mail voting, in which all registered voters receive a ballot in the mail that they can mail in or drop off at a secure ballot drop station. Currently, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, among other states, send every registered voter a mail-in ballot. Additionally, military members and Americans living overseas send their ballots in by mail in every single state. Among the entire U.S. electorate, voting by mail in presidential elections has steadily increased in recent decades, reaching over 20% in 2016.

There is no evidence that all-mail elections increase voter fraud. In fact, voter fraud is almost nonexistent in the United States. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank which tracks voter fraud, found just 1,298 cases of voter fraud since 1992 out of over a billion votes cast in thousands of elections. For instance, only 204 of these cases in the last 20 years were related to absentee ballots.

Mail-in voting remains popular in states that already have it. Research from Oregon, the state with the longest vote-by-mail history, demonstrates that “Oregonians have maintained their overwhelming support for vote-by-mail elections — in particular, women, Independents, Republicans, and older voters.” Furthermore, vote-by-mail generally increases turnout among voters, but that increased turnout does not advantage a particular political party.

Washington Secretary of State, Republican Kim Wyman, recently wrote, “As an elected secretary of state with decades of experience administering elections, I believe mail-in voting works, and Washington state — which signed vote-by-mail into law in 2011 — is proof that it works. Plus, it’s safe and secure.”

The bigger issue with vote by mail tends to be undercounting — that is, the non-inclusion of cast ballots due to unintentional errors, such as signing the wrong envelope, forgetting to sign the form at all, sending in the ballot too late, or signing a signature not matching the signature on record. The Constitution does not offer us a step-by-step guide for how elections will be conducted nationwide. Rather “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections” is left up to each state. This can lead to confusion among the electorate when it comes to understanding and evaluating the safety and processes of voting in their own as well as in their neighboring states. Therefore, it is paramount that everyone takes a moment to study their own state’s vote-by-mail processes.

Although the presidential election may be particularly contentious, and we might not know all of the election results at the end of the night on November 3, be assured that secretaries of state, county clerks, poll workers, and many other people are working hard to ensure a safe and secure election.

Kylee Britzman is an assistant professor of political science at Lewis-Clark State College. Leif Hoffmann is an associate professor of political science at Lewis-Clark State College.