Commentary: It's Time to Scrap the Mail-In Charade and Restore True Absentee Voting
Americans should vote in person unless they absolutely cannot.
Before 2020, most Americans understood that citizens should vote at their designated polling place unless they physically could not. Then COVID-19 handed Democrats a pretext to turn need-based absentee voting into no-excuse mail-in voting. Today, the District of Columbia and eight states automatically mail a ballot to every registered voter. Many other states let anyone request a mail ballot for any reason. Both models elevate mail-in voting to the same optional level as early in-person voting. This creates an unnecessary hazard for fraud and corrupts the American democratic tradition of showing up with one's community and casting a ballot in person.
Absentee Voting Should Be Safe, Legal, and Rare
People should only vote absentee if they have a legitimate reason for not voting in person. Traditionally, that meant voters planned to be away from their assigned precinct, or they were sick or bedridden during the election. Historically, only 5–15 percent of voters cast absentee ballots that way. In 2020, that number shot up to 46 percent, according to Pew Research Center. That wasn't a pandemic exception. That was a completely different system. Democrats replaced need-based absentee voting with universal mail-in voting.
This quadrupled volume of mail-in ballots multiplied election workers' workloads. That created a pretext for leftist billionaire-funded nonprofits to bankroll election operations, which allowed those nonprofits to put their thumbs on the scale to boost turnout in liberal areas. Another downstream effect was delayed results. Because election offices had to process millions of additional mail-in ballots, results were delayed, and late-arriving ballots flipped some outcomes. This sowed doubt about the validity of the results among half the country's voters.
Absentee Voting Is a Necessary Evil; Mail-In Voting Is an Optional Hazard
Voters who physically cannot make it to the polls have as much right as any other duly registered citizen to cast their ballot. But because absentee voting is less secure than in-person voting, the process should provide additional safeguards to make cheating as close to impossible as it can be.
Applicants should have to state their reason for requesting an absentee ballot. In addition to attesting to their identity under penalty of perjury, they should also have at least one—preferably two—witnesses attest to their request. They should also have to provide the last four digits of their Social Security number or the digits of another government-issued photo ID. Any duly registered voter can easily meet those standards. A fraudster cannot.
Mail-in voting makes it easy for political machines to commit voter fraud—especially in states with weak voter ID laws and poorly maintained voter rolls. The bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission, led by former Democrat President Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker, warned in 2005 that absentee ballots "remain the largest source of potential voter fraud." History backs that assessment. Political machines have used absentee ballots to cheat for generations. Cheaters need only calculate the number of fraudulent votes required to guarantee a victory. They can then identify low-propensity voters or registered voters who can no longer vote because they are dead or have moved and cast mail-in ballots in their names. At least with absentee voting, law enforcement has often caught on to those schemes. Universal mail-in voting makes fraud detection harder because of the massive increase in volume.
Congress Can Restore Absentee Voting Nationwide
Congress can lock in the way most states handled absentee voting before COVID-19. The House has passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, which would require proof of citizenship and identity to vote by mail. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) introduced an amendment to restrict mail-in voting to need-based cases. The Save America Act currently lags in the Senate for lack of Republican support.
That may finally change after the midterms. If Republicans can hold the Senate, they just might find the gumption to pass the SAVE America Act and return the country to a system in which voting in person is the rule and absentee voting is the exception.
Americans can contact their senators today at SaveActNow.com and demand that they force a vote on it.
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