Workers transport a dolly of mail-in ballots at the Allegheny County Elections Division office in downtown Pittsburgh on Wednesday. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
May 30, 2020
President Trump is raising a completely legitimate concern that an unprecedented expansion in the use of mail-in ballots in the 2020 election could lead to voter fraud. But that has not stopped his critics from declaring his statements to be false.
Really? In 2012, before mail-in voting became a partisan political litmus test, the New York Times published an article titled “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.” The piece noted that “there is a bipartisan consensus that voting by mail … is more easily abused than other forms,” and that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.” A bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James A. Baker III, concluded in 2005 that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and that “vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” Carter and Baker also pointed out that citizens who vote at nursing homes “are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation.” In Florida, there is even a name for this: “granny farming.”
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