Recently Donald Trump has been bellowing about how mail-in voting is full of fraud and that if allowed it will make the 2020 national election the most "rigged and fraudulent in history." Lots of folks, including myself, don't agree. But Instead of just claiming that mail-in ballots are OK, I would prefer to see what the evidence reveals.
Currently 46 states (22 Republican and 24 Democrat) use either total or partial mail-in voting, and none have reported serious problems. Of the organizations that examine ballots for fraud, the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank, has the longest track record. From the 2000 through 2016 presidential elections they sampled millions of votes out of the 627 million cast nation-wide and found 1200 cases of alleged fraud, but they didn't say out of how many votes. Assuming that their sample was only 1% (6.27 million) of the total number of votes (it was probably much higher), that comes out to only 0.02% of fraudulent votes from in-person and mail-in voting combined.
Recently the Brookings Institute analyzed information collected by the Heritage Foundation from ballots obtained from Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington over several election cycles prior 2018. Of 49,917,586 ballots examined there were 44 cases of fraud of which 29 were mail-in ballots. That's 0.00009% of total ballots and 0.00006% of mail-in ones. These data are consistent with a recent interview of the Lieutenant Governor of Utah (a Republican) who is in charge of that state's elections. His and his staff's review of Utah's mail-in ballots also showed the degree of fraud to be a small fraction of a percent.
In a different study, The Electronic Registration Center examined mail-in ballots in three states (didn't say which three). Collectively they examined 14.6 million ballots of which they found 372 fraudulent ones. Rounded up, that's 0.0026%.
In addition to the above, there is one qualitative study worthy of note. After becoming President in 2017, Donald Trump remained so obsessed with losing the 2016 popular vote to Hillary Clinton that he convened a task force to look into voter fraud. This group found so little fraud that the task force was disbanded without submitting a report. Accordingly, Trump's rant against mail-in voting is in contrast to his own information. Not the first time Trump has contradicted himself.
In brief, available evidence does not reveal any substantial voter fraud with mail-in balloting. Accordingly, for safety in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we should have national mail-in voting for the 2020 election coming up. Furthermore, considering that mail-in ballots can reach more potential voters of both parties and make it easier to vote, national mail-in voting for future elections should be considered/debated by Congress, and if found favorable, then passed into law.
Daniel Richardson
Payson, AZ (August 2020)