Steven Rosenfeld for The Fulcrum:
It is an article of faith among those who do not believe Donald Trump lost in 2020 that mailing ballots to voters increases illegal voting — often called voter fraud.
“Before the machines were introduced, vote riggers needed a way to cheat and it always involved generating LOOSE BALLOTS,” read a recent post on a pro-Trump Telegram “election education” channel. “It’s possible and therefore it happens,” said a nearby post.
It is understandable why disappointed Trump supporters are wary of mailed-out ballots. The Covid-19 pandemic led to a historic expansion of their use as a way to protect voters and election workers. By the time the 2020 election ended, 73 million Americans — 46 percent of all voters nationwide — had voted with a mailed-out ballot. That volume was nearly triple the voters who received a ballot by mail in 2018’s general election.
But articles of faith are not facts. As the 2024 presidential cycle revs up and Trump, the likely GOP nominee, keeps attacking elections, it is worth revisiting the most extensive national study by political scientists that looked at whether mailed-out ballots have any relation to voter fraud. In a word, their answer was “no.” That conclusion was based on comparing incidents of illegal voting during the two decades before the 2020 presidential election to the increasing use of mailed-out ballots during that time.
“If voting by mail creates more opportunities for fraud, those opportunities do not appear to have been realized in the data,” George Mason University assistant professor Jonathan Auerbach and Stephen Pierson, director of science policy for the American Statistical Association, wrote in their 2021 analysis for ASA’s journal, Statistics and Public Policy.
The statisticians are not saying voter fraud does not exist. They are showing — with state-by-state data from 2000 through 2019 — that it is exceptionally rare. When illegal voting has occurred, their charts reveal, it usually involves no more than several dozen ballots. That volume is nowhere near the thousands of votes that would have been needed to alter the closest recent presidential election margins…..