Ballot fraud is a very serious problem in the USA
And it is not just about the 2020 Presidential election
This post is not about whether Biden or Trump actually won the 2020 election!!!! Just get the issue out of your mind. It is about a far more serious issue.
Ballot fraud is a very serious problem in the United States, and it has been ever since the founding of the Republic. I will write in later posts about ballot fraud in American history, but for today I would like to address a more contemporary issue.
A recent poll by Rasmussen (a very respected and non-partisan polling institution) concluded that 21% of mail-in voters stated that they committed an act that was legal ballot fraud in the 2020 election. Since roughly 30% of voters in the 2020 election voted by absentee or mail-in ballot, this leads to an overall total of 6.3% who admitted to committing such acts. The Margin of Sampling Error of the poll was +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
To be clear, the poll did not ask “Did you commit ballot fraud?” Obviously, the vast majority of that 6% would have said “No.” Instead, the pollsters asked a series of questions about whether they committed acts that are illegal in some (all?) states.
Here is the actual wording of the relevant questions in the poll:
”We are now going to ask you several questions about voting in the 2020 Presidential election. Your responses will remain anonymous, so please answer honestly.
Who did you vote for in the 2020 Presidential election?
Did you vote with an absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election?
(Answered by the 30% of respondents who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot): During the 2020 election, did a friend or family member fill out your ballot, in part or in full, on your behalf?
During the 2020 election, did you fill out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?
(Answered by the 30% of respondents who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot): During the 2020 election, did you cast a mail-in ballot in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident?
During the 2020 election, did you sign a ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member, with or without his or her permission?
(Answered by all): During the 2020 election, did a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party, offer to pay or reward you for voting?
Do you know a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance who has admitted to you that he or she cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than his or her state of permanent residence?
Do you know a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance who has admitted to you that he or she filled out a ballot on behalf of another person?
I have a PhD in Political Science and have worked on several official polls. I was not formally trained in polling methodology, but I have read several books about the subject. I have also written questions for polls.
I think that the questions in this poll were well-crafted and presented in the correct order. I do not see any reason to doubt the overall results.
It is important to note that as you shrink the sample size, the margin of error rises, so the 6.3% who admitted to committing one of the above acts is probably somewhere between 2 and 12 percent. Either way, this is well within the typical margins of competitive elections for U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Gubernatorial, and state legislative races. It is also well within the margin for the popular vote for Presidential elections and swing states in the Electoral College, which indirectly determines the outcome of Presidential elections.
It is unclear how Rasmussen calculated the 21%, but it appears to be anyone who answered YES to any of the following questions listed above: 3, 4, or 6. It is also unclear whether Rasmussen checked the laws for each of the states of the respondents or filtered out any respondents who answered Yes in states where the practice was legal.
I must confess that I do not know the exact wording of the ballot laws for each state. It is possible that all states make those three acts illegal. It is also possible that only some states do, so some of those respondents may not have committed an illegal act.
Regardless these results are extremely troubling. The entire point of a secret ballot is to ensure that voters are not unduly swayed by other people during the actual act of voting. Political discussions before the act is expected and desirable, but not during the act of voting.
I am sure that some people will say “What is the big deal? We do not know if it actually changed anyone’s vote or influenced the outcome.”
While it is true that we do not know the impact of these behaviors on election outcomes, these laws were created for a reason. We do not want people with strong political opinions influencing people with less (or no) political opinions while they are actually voting.
It is also possible that ballot fraud by one side is offset by equal amounts of ballot fraud by the other side in the same election. That seems possible in any one race, but what about when you include dozens of competitive Congressional races and hundreds of competitive state legislative races? There is no way that ballot fraud does not impact election outcomes if it is widespread as the Rasmussen poll suggests.
Ballot laws must balance voter convenience with the integrity of the electoral system. We could just leave blank ballots at libraries, courthouses, and other public facilities and just have people fill out the ballots and drop them off. We do not do this because we know that this makes it far too easy for bad actors or simply just over-zealous actors to commit ballot fraud.
We have in-person voting because it decreases the chances of a person unduly influencing another person during the act of voting. We also do so to reduce the chances of ballot stuffing (a worse form of ballot fraud that was not addressed in the survey).
The trend over the last 20 years has been to make voting more convenient to increase turnout. This trend has been pushed particularly hard by Democrats who are convinced that non-voters would vote for them if given the chance. Radically expanding absentee and mail-in ballots seem like a fair method for doing so.
This trend towards expanding alternative means of voting accelerated rapidly in 2020 because of the obvious potential risks of face-to-face contact. It was a legitimate concern that fear of getting Covid would depress turnout and those additional non-voters would skew the results. So many Democratic-controlled state legislatures liberalized voting rules as an emergency action.
Those who support this trend implicitly made ballot security a lesser value. It has become fashionable to insist that absentee ballots and mail-in ballots are just as secure as on-site voting.
It is pretty clear that the results of this survey blow this theory out of the water. True, the pollsters did not ask on-site voters the same question, but I think that it is pretty obvious that if they did the results would be near zero (which is exactly why they did not ask the question in the first place).
I believe that the results of this poll prove that the rapid expansion of absentee ballots and mail-in ballots are far more subject to ballot fraud than on-site voting. If someone disagrees with me on this, leave a comment.
And this really matters because:
We have a federal government that disperses trillions of dollars every year. That is a huge temptation to use ballot fraud to increase one’s control over that money.
The federal government keeps growing in relative power with every decade.
The two major parties are moving further and further from each other on policy preferences, so the outcome of elections has a very real impact on public policy.
We have a polarized political culture where trust in the other side is rapidly declining. If we have an electoral process that is perceived as enabling ballot fraud, this further decreases trust in the legitimacy of the final outcome.
Most importantly, if partisans think the other side is committing ballot fraud, then this gives them the incentive and the excuse to do more of the same. This risks creating a downward spiral of ballot fraud with trillions of dollars per year at stake.
If we had a political system with a weak federal government and relatively moderate parties, then one could argue that the consequences would be much less. But that is clearly no longer the case.
Our current system makes every competitive election potentially determined by ballot fraud with little way to determine whether ballot fraud happened after the fact. In such a system, it is impossible to know who really won the election, even after the votes are recounted.
If we apply this to the 2020 Presidential election, there is no way to know who really won the election, regardless of what Trump, Biden, the Democratic party, or the Republican party say. Ballot fraud was bigger than the voting margin.
If we were to apply the same voting process to previous Presidential elections, we would not really know who won in 2016, 2004, 2000. Each of those elections had an electoral college and popular vote well within the margin of ballot fraud identified in the poll. Even the Obama win in 2012 is likely within the margin of ballot fraud.
This also makes it very likely that ballot fraud will be larger than the vote difference in the 2024 Presidential election as well. And this does not even include the margins for competitive elections for U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Gubernatorial, and state legislative races. Every competitive race is open to being determined by ballot fraud.
That is not a good place to be!
We seriously need to reign in the following practices:
Absentee ballots
Mail-in ballots
Ballot harvesting
The inconvenience of voters having to physically go to polling stations is simply not worth destroying the integrity of our elections. The radical expansion of absentee ballots and mail-in ballots now look like yet another well-intentioned experiment that had more negative consequences than positive consequences. Both should be only for cases of clear need, and ballot harvesting should be eliminated.
I know that there are some Democrats that will be unwilling to accept this proposal because they perceive that the current practices benefit their party. Remember that if we keep this current process in place, your preferred candidates will sometimes (often) lose to ballot fraud. The current process may temporarily benefit your favored candidate, but it might later be used by your opponents to better effect.
Is that what you really want?
As usual, the rules for commenting are as follows:
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Keep the comment on the same topic as my post. This post is not about whether Biden or Trump actually won the 2020 election!!!!
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There's three kinds of questions which suggest outstanding fraud but I'm not sure how reliable the questions actually are, which are (1) the filling out of of ballots, (2) state residency, and (3) signed envelopes.
(1) seems like the most obvious fraud but it's also wildly unclear to me whether if I ask my wife to fill out a ballot straight ticket R/D and I sign the ballot that we've committed electoral fraud. I suppose we have, but on the other hand I'm unable to appreciate that this is a crisis of democracy.
Regarding (2), the question about permanent residency has a huge number of gaps in it, such as persons misinterpreting if they have moved since 2020, legal military and overseas voters answering yes, legal college students answering yes, and legal transient workers voting yes.
Regarding (3), some states have mechanisms in which you may legally sign a ballot envelope which is not yours: many states have provisions for witnesses and assisters to sign ballot envelopes, and in fact, Virginia in 2020 required that absentee ballot envelopes be signed by witnesses. So positive answers to this question also do not necessarily indicate fraud.
I do think someone should "get to the bottom of this" but I'm also quite skeptical that this poll reveals that 20% of absentee ballots were cast fraudulently.