Jonathan White WaPo oped:

But November’s presidential election actually isn’t the first to raise questions about how Americans might vote without coming to the polls. The debate today mirrors the heated partisan rhetoric of the 1860s. Never before had so many voters been away from their homes during elections, and the idea of permitting soldiers to use absentee ballots touched off a rancorous national debate. Then as now, it hinged on balancing concern about fraud with the right to vote. Ultimately, American democracy was greatly enriched by expanding access to the ballot and affirming that this right was at the core of U.S. citizenship.

At the beginning of the Civil War, only one state — Pennsylvania — permitted soldiers to vote in the field. In 1861, thousands of Pennsylvania soldiers voted for state and local offices from their military camps as far away as Virginia. Unfortunately, fraud permeated the elections. One regiment allegedly cast a 900-vote majority for a Republican candidate from Philadelphia even though the regiment had only 60 or 70 men from the city. “The frauds were very gross,” noted Philadelphia diarist Sidney George Fisher, and “all parties were guilty.”…