Voter fraud is very rare, whether people vote in person or by mail. That much is clear from a large body of research.
One of us is a political scientist at the University of Washington, and the other is a former elections commissioner who now studies voting laws. We can explain why voter fraud is so rare – especially for mail-in ballots, which have drawn both the interest and concern of many people this year.
The goal, of course, is to make sure that ballots received by mail are legitimate – that they are cast by registered voters, not by others lying about their identity, and that each voter casts only one ballot in a single election. The mail-in voting process has several built-in safeguards that together make it hard for one person to vote fraudulently, and even more difficult to commit voter fraud on a scale capable of swinging election outcomes. Continue reading.