Title: Is voting by mail safer for us? That depends on how you define ‘safe.’ - The Washington Post
Headings: More voting by mail would make the 2020 election safer for our health. But it comes with risks of its own.
More voting by mail would make the 2020 election safer for our health. But it comes with risks of its own.
It’s not clear whether “at-home voting” can be ramped up nationwide by November
The growth of voting by mail
Leaks in the vote-by-mail system
How can these problems be prevented?
Can it be done by November?
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Content: Once delivered to the local election office, the ballot is verified — often by matching the ballot’s signature to the voter’s signature on file — and then counted. Each step has hazards. One of us, Charles Stewart, after analyzing data reported by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and in public opinion studies, estimated that in 2008, 3.9 million requested ballots were never received; 2.9 million ballots mailed to voters were never returned; and 800,000 returned ballots were rejected. Advertisement
Not all these gaps were failures. Some people may have requested mail ballots and then voted in person. But that’s not true of others; nearly 1 million ballots were rejected, mainly because of mismatched or missing signatures or ballots arriving too late. Story continues below advertisement
People who vote by mail are significantly more likely to make mistakes than those who vote in person, as Stewart and collaborators found in a study of California election results from 1990 to 2010.