Mail-in voting could accidentally disenfranchise millions of voters

Marc A. Thiessen

August 6, 2020 at 3:23 p.m. EDT

President Trump is suing Nevada over its recent decision to send absentee ballots to all voters,
and warning the country “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less
than substantially fraudulent.” Trump’s critics argue that there is no evidence that voting by mail
results in fraud. Trump is right that mail-in voting is a source of potential voter fraud, especially
on the scale that is being proposed. But the bigger problem is not vote fraud — it’s vote failure.

There is plenty of evidence that mail-in voting has the unintended consequence of
disenfranchising of millions of eligible voters. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of
the 2008 presidential election found that about 3.9 million voters said they requested mail ballots
but never received them; 2.9 million ballots that were sent out did not make it back to election
officials; and about 800,000 were rejected for a variety of reasons — either because they were
postmarked after the election, arrived without a signature, were improperly filled out or did not
match voting records. “The pipeline that moves mail ballots between voters and election officials
is very leaky,” the study concluded.

More recently, the 2020 Democratic primaries should serve as a cautionary tale. About six weeks
after New York’s congressional primaries, winners were not declared in two closely watched
House races until Tuesday. That’s thanks to complications in counting the surge of more
than 400,000 mail-in ballots, of which state officials have already invalidated 84,000. In
California, election officials rejected more than 100,000 mail-in ballots in the state’s March
presidential primary. To put these numbers in perspective, Trump won the White House in 2016
thanks to roughly 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin combined. In
Pennsylvania alone, mail ballot problems kept about 92,000 people from voting in a primary in a
state that Trump won by just 44,000 votes four years ago. In Florida, about 18,500 mail-in
ballots were not counted, and in Nevada, about 6,700 were rejected. In a close race, such failures
could easily call the results into question.

None of these problems were because of fraud. They were because of mistakes by voters, postal
problems or the inability to handle the massive surge in ballots that overwhelmed electoral
systems not equipped to handle them. If election officials had this much trouble handing mail-in
ballots during low-turnout primaries, imagine what will happen in the general election. Put aside
the ability of election officials to process the results. Does anyone believe that the U.S. Postal
Service is ready to handle a sudden deluge of tens of millions of ballots right before Election
Day? Millions of ballots are inevitably going to be delayed, be misdirected or arrive without
postmarks. And many will be invalidated because voters made mistakes filling them out and
could not ask election workers for help marking the ballots correctly.

If mail-in voting is permitted on an unprecedented scale, millions of votes will be rejected and
the election could be thrown the election into chaos. Ironically, it could very well be Democrats
who end up crying foul. A study of Georgia’s 2018 midterm elections found that mail-in ballots
of “younger, minority and first-time voters are most likely to be thrown out.” A study of
Florida’s midterms that same year determined that mail-in ballots “cast by Black, Hispanic, and
other racial and ethnic minorities were more than twice as likely to be rejected as … ballots cast
by White absentee mail voters.” Democrats now pushing for mail-in ballots will soon be
claiming they are a tool of voter suppression.

The Democrats’ solution to these problems is to relax the standards for mail-in ballots, such as
the requirement that they be postmarked. Now that is an invitation to fraud. If a candidate is
narrowly behind on election night, what is to stop their supporters from sending in a slew of
ballots after Election Day — especially in states that permit “ballot harvesting,” where campaign
workers collect absentee ballots in bulk? There will be millions of blank ballots in circulation,
because instead of sending ballots only to voters who request them, many states intend them to
send to every registered voter — which inevitably includes many who moved or died.

This probably does not matter in deep-blue and deep-red states where the final result is not in
doubt. But in swing states such as Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, it could lead to
disaster — even if there is no fraud. Most states have no experience with mail-in voting on this
scale and are completely unprepared for what is coming. We are conducting an unprecedented
electoral experiment in the midst of one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history. The
result could be a post-election battle that will make the hanging chad controversy of Bush v.
Gore seem mild by comparison.