Due to the novel coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that where possible, Americans should vote by mail. This recommendation has resulted in 34 states and D.C. relaxing their absentee voting requirements and allowing citizens to vote absentee without an excuse.
Even before the current pandemic, five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington – conducted all-mail elections and every state provided some form of absentee voting.
As states have expanded access to absentee voting, President Trump has repeatedly attacked mail-in voting -- falsely claiming that it is "fraudulent” and will result in a “rigged election.”
Numerous studies have shown that there is no evidence of significant voter fraud and that mail-in voting does not manipulate election results.
Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt studied U.S. elections from 2000 to 2014 in search of voter fraud and found 31 possible instances of fraud out of more than 1 billion votes cast.
A five-year study commissioned by President George W. Bush to investigate voter fraud, found “the pervasiveness of fraud to be debatable.” Of the 119 people charged by the commission, 86 were convicted, with many of those charged for “mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules.”
After the 2016 presidential election, a report by The Washington Post, found four documented cases of voter fraud out of more than 135 million votes cast.
Despite President Trump’s recent attacks on mail-in voting, Americans have been voting by mail since the Revolutionary War.
One of the first known examples of absentee voting in the U.S. occurred in 1775 when a group of Continental Army soldiers were permitted to vote by absentee in a local election in Hollis, New Hampshire.
The first widespread use of absentee voting occurred during the Civil War. In order to ensure that Union soldiers were able to vote in the 1864 president election, Wisconsin became the first state to legalize absentee voting. Over the course of the war, 19 northern states passed legislation allowing soldiers to vote away from home. As a result, about 150,000 of the 1 million Union soldiers voted absentee.
By the 1944 presidential election, all 48 states let soldiers vote by absentee in the midst World War II, accounting for nearly seven percent of the total electorate and about 3.2 million votes cast.
In 2000, Oregon became the nation’s first all vote-by-mail state -- followed by Washington in 2011 and Colorado in 2013.
Since the first absentee ballots were cast, critics have cried foul.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln’s Democratic opponents asserted absentee voting was “a scheme” by Republicans "to gain some great advantage to their party."
Now, President Trump is contenting that Democrats will “cheat by using mail-ins!"
Yet, despite claims of absentee ballot fraud, study after study has repeatedly shown that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. The reality is that absentee voting is as old as America herself and in the 2020 Presidential Election will help Americans can vote safely during a pandemic.
[Source: CDC, Considerations for Election Polling Locations and Voters, June 22, 2020]
[Source: Twitter, @realDonaldTrump, May 26, 2020]
[Source: Twitter, @realDonaldTrump, May 24, 2020]
[Source: WAPO, A comprehensive investigation of voter impersonation finds 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast, August 6, 2014]
[Source: The New York Times, In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud, April 12, 2007]
[Source: Politico, Why Republicans Can’t Find the Big Voter Fraud Conspiracy, April 2, 2017]
[Source: The Washington Post, There have been just four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election, December 1, 2016]
[Source: Politico, Why Republicans Can’t Find the Big Voter Fraud Conspiracy, April 2, 2017]
[Source: The New York Times, How Lincoln Won the Soldier Vote, November 7, 2014]
[Source: NBC News, How do you know voting by mail works? The U.S. military's done it since the Civil War., April 19, 2020]
[Source: History of Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, August 1885]
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