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.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a historic expansion of mail-in ballot use as a way to protect voters and election workers. By the time the 2020 election ended, 73 million Americans — 46% 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. 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.”
“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.