Despite suspicions that absentee ballots increase the risk of voter fraud, voting absentee has become an increasingly popular method in recent years. According to the United States Election Assistance Commission, 14.2 million people used absentee ballots in the 2010 mid-term federal election, a substantial 15.6 percent of the total 90.8 million voters.

According to the New York Times, election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting, making the increasing popular method increasingly unreliable. 

Given how close this year's presidential race is, tensions have increased as the questions of fraud have been raised.

“Frankly, I do think it’s partisan politics that’s designed to boost the vote on the side of the people who are wanting to win and to depress the opposition side. I think it’s partisan politics in Florida, I think it’s partisan politics in Ohio, I think it’s partisan politics in most of the swing states where it’s really close,” said Ange-Marie Hancock, Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at University of Southern California. “So you’ll notice there hasn’t been in California, a true blue state, any concern about this voter election fraud.”

Some do not see voter fraud as a legitimate problem at all.

“Charges of hordes of ineligible voters almost always turn out to be false,” Wendy Weiser, Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in U.S. News, citing a recent South Carolina example of fraud allegations. “When election authorities conducted a painstaking study… they discovered nothing more than clerical errors, bad data matching, and stray marks on scanners.” 

Last month, Florida election officials filed a voter registration fraud claim against the state Democratic Party, the Florida New Majority Education Fund and the National Council of La Raza/ Democracia USA, caliming that after cross-referencing voter rolls with driver’s licenses, they believed that 2,600 registered voters were not U.S. citizens.

Florida has been criticized by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act.

This however, did not deter their allegations, with Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott announcing on Tuesday his administration’s plans to sue the federal government for their refusal to cooperate with election officials. 

“My honest opinion is really that political expediency is carrying the day,” Hancock said. “So they’re not very concerned about what happens on Nov. 7. They’re concerned about what happens in the days and weeks leading up to Nov. 7.  I think it’s win at any costs, and as long as they won’t be seriously penalized for bringing a false lawsuit or something like that, they’re able to kind of manipulate the system, to make sure that their side gains the advantage.”

She views voter fraud as a problem that the United States has more or less overcome in recent decades.

“Historically, voter fraud was much more of a problem in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, in several different urban areas, with regard to machine politics, where literally, you could find people voting on behalf of dead people,” she said. “So that is legitimate voter fraud. However, most of those kinds of political machines that were designed to kind of leverage that fraud, are no longer in existence.”

She added that voting methods in some states are outdated, pointing out that the difference between using paper methods in California touchscreen technology in Ohio.

“Absentee ballots and other things that are more twentieth-century approaches to voting are more susceptible to fraud, but empirical studies have shown that there’s not a lot of fraud in the system,”  she said.

 

Reach Staff Reporter Michelle Toh here.