It was 1972 and I was studying in Yeshivas Kol Torah in Bayit Vegan when I received a summons from the American Embassy. When I got to the “Yimka” building (the YMCA where the embassy was then located), I was detained and charged with voter fraud.
What had happened was that, at my request, I was mailed an absentee ballot for that year’s presidential election. I had filled it out and sent it in. But without noticing that it was marked “military ballot.” To the embassy bureaucrats, since I had a deferment from army service—it was the height of the Vietnam draft era—and had never donned a military uniform, I had inadvertently cast an illegal vote.
After being confined in a room for what I remember as several hours (but was probably several minutes), I was released (and Richard Nixon, even deprived of my vote, easily won the election).
Voting by mail is a thing these days; so is controversy about it.
Twenty-eight states offer “no-excuse” absentee voting, which means that any voter can request and cast an absentee/mail ballot. Eight states and Washington, DC, conduct elections entirely by mail. And the remaining states require a voter to provide an excuse—like illness, caregiver status or being out of town on Election Day—to qualify for an absentee/mail ballot.
Voters by mail mark their ballot, put it in a tamper-proof envelope, seal it and then place it into a separate mailing envelope. They then sign an affidavit on the exterior of the mailing envelope and return the package, either through the postal service or by dropping it off at an official site.
By-mail voting’s main upside is the ease it offers to voters. The main objection to voting by mail is that it is slightly more vulnerable to fraud. If voter registration rolls are not up to date, with voters who have moved or died not purged from the lists, fraudulent votes can be cast more easily by mail than with in-person voting. But advanced mail polling systems can protect the integrity of mailed votes by tracking, validation, and verification techniques.
And, contrary to Internet rumors, there is no evidence of ballots having been lost by the postal service.
Another problem with by-mail voting is that voters often send in their votes well before Election Day, which may cause them to miss developments that might have changed their vote.
How common, though, is fraud in by-mail voting? The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation examined the record in Oregon, which has used mail elections since 1998. They found 14 cases of attempted mail fraud—out of 15.5 million ballots cast. And those would-be fraudsters were all unsuccessful.
The think tank has long been monitoring election fraud of all sorts—not only linked to mail ballots but also by registering individuals to vote and forging their signatures, by voting while ineligible, or by pretending to be someone else at a polling place. It found 1,465 proven cases of election fraud; and 1,264 of them resulted in criminal prosecutions.
And those numbers reflect more than a decade of data during which hundreds of millions of votes were cast.
During the 2020 election, there were 103 cases of fraud in Texas, out of more than 11 million votes cast. That amounts to a fraud percentage of 0.000096%.
Over the course of that year’s election, in all six battleground states, there were, according to an Associated Press investigation, 475 cases of voter fraud of any sort. Arizona had the highest number of potential fraud cases of the states: 198. Out of 3.4 million votes cast.
I have a row of stickers declaring “I voted by mail” affixed to a shelf above my home working desk. It was always a pain, if a minor one, to vote at my local polling place; voting by mail was simple. Moreover, it afforded me the ability to more easily research candidates and positions as I marked my ballot. And I have been impressed by the security measures that are part of the process.
Still and all, whenever I prepare to mark my choices on the ballot, out of some residual paranoia, I suppose, I scan the ballot carefully to make sure it doesn’t have the word “military” on it.
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