NYT 2012: Voting by mail is a recipe for fraud

by philg

“Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” (New York Times, October 6, 2012):

While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.

The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy.

Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner. The list includes the 2000 presidential election, in which problems with absentee ballots in Florida were a little-noticed footnote to other issues.

Still, voting in person is more reliable, particularly since election administrators made improvements to voting equipment after the 2000 presidential election.

“Trump Is Pushing a False Argument on Vote-by-Mail Fraud. Here Are the Facts.” (August 31, 2020):

President Trump has begun pushing a false argument that has circulated among conservatives for years — that voting by mail is a recipe for fraud.

That’s the beauty of #Science… the truth evolves until eventually there is a scientific consensus.

10 thoughts on “NYT 2012: Voting by mail is a recipe for fraud”

  1. Mailing blank ballots to 100% of registered voters (in some areas, that’s 110% of eligible citizens) when normally only about 50% actually vote is an opportunity for fraud. But its greatly increased with ballot “harvesting”, whereby people are allowed to collect+submit other people’s ballots (without signatures) days after the election.

    California 2016: In Orange County – once seen as a Republican stronghold in the state– every House seat went to a Democrat after an unprecedented “250,000” vote-by-mail drop-offs were counted, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “People were carrying in stacks of 100 and 200 of them. We had had multiple people calling to ask if these people were allowed to do this,” Kelley said.

  2. “In the last presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.

    Some voters presumably decided not to vote after receiving ballots, but Mr. Stewart said many others most likely tried to vote and were thwarted. “If 20 percent, or even 10 percent, of voters who stood in line on Election Day were turned away,” he wrote in the study, published in The Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, “there would be national outrage.”

    I wonder what Charles Stewart III has to say about all of this?

    https://polisci.mit.edu/people/charles-stewart-iii

    I don’t know why anyone thinks there’s a significant potential for fraud with mail-in voting. After all, the term: “The Check Is In The Mail” is so archaic at this point, nobody pays their bills or invoices that way, and the whole problem is in the Dustbin of History.

    The system is basically the same as it was in 2012, it still relies on the same human beings running the same kinds of machines, doing the same tasks with the same pieces of paper, and all of the same problems can be predicted to occur again. The issue of whether that is important or not is a matter of whose party stands to lose and whether or not that matters to the New York Times.

  3. In 2010, Professor Stewart said “there would be national outrage.”

    Here’s the paper the NYT cites:

    https://nyujlpp.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Charles-Stewart-III-Losing-Votes-by-Mail.pdf

    As of the times we live in, he’s done a complete 180.

    “Let’s put the vote-by-mail ‘fraud’ myth to rest.”

    https://shass.mit.edu/news/news-2020-pandemic-voting-mail-safe-honest-and-fair-stewart

    But he’s talking about fraud, not “lost votes.” The choice of terminology is fascinating.

  6. Pure sillyness Trump will be elected Emperor for Life. By the ballot box or by the ammo box. But there is no doubt about the outcome. The democrats will not allow any other result. Going to be fun to watch. When the Northeast states attempt to secede I propose the new country be named: New Northeasternstan.

  10. Massachusetts rejected 18,000 mail-in ballots (2%) during the recent state primary.

    “Almost 2 percent of all mail-in ballots cast in the state primary were rejected for reasons ranging from late delivery to missing signatures, meaning nearly 18,000 ballots weren’t counted during the state’s first foray into no-excuse mail-in voting.”

    https://patch.com/massachusetts/medford/s/h9ddp/2-percent-of-mail-in-ballots-were-rejected-in-state-primary

    “But some local election officials were overwhelmed by the flood of mail-in ballots, of which there’ll be many more in November. Franklin Town Clerk Teresa Burr resigned after 3,000 mail-in ballots were found (and later counted) after Election Day. She called it “the most challenging election cycle of my career.”

    How do you lose all those boxes when you know they’re coming?

    The Illustrious Potentates approve:

    “It was by and large deemed a success by Galvin, calling it a “positive experience.”

    So they admit 2% of the voters were disenfranchised, there are going to be a lot more ballots in November, but hey, it’s all good. The good news: during the big show, they cannot finish the count until at least November 7:

    “Voters and election officials will have some leeway for the general election, though: Ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 and received by Nov. 6 will be counted.”

    At least in Massachusetts, I don’t see how they declare anything on election night given these facts. The 6th is a Friday, are they going to work through the weekend?

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