The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.
States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots since they were mailed - and the figure of 28 million missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency's survey questions.
A 2012 report in The New York Times noted that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots "Is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say. In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time." According to a Wall Street Journal report on voter exploitation in Hispanic communities in Texas, mail-in ballots have "Spawned a mini-industry of consultants who get out the absentee vote, sometimes using questionable techniques." Poor, elderly, and minority communities are most likely to be preyed upon by so-called ballot "Brokers."
Of the 7 million ballots the state sent out in those two elections, some 871,000 ballots are totally unaccounted for.
Use of mail-in ballots more than doubled from 24.9 million in 2004 to 57.2 million in 2016, and around 40% of U.S. votes are now done by mail.
If the current pandemic is going to force the issue during a presidential election, proponents of voting by mail may have to address obvious risks that come with proposing that more than 200 million ballots be mailed out this fall.
"These numbers of missing ballots demonstrate large voter list maintenance failures and security gaps within the broader mail voting process."
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html
States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots since they were mailed - and the figure of 28 million missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency's survey questions.
A 2012 report in The New York Times noted that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots "Is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say. In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time." According to a Wall Street Journal report on voter exploitation in Hispanic communities in Texas, mail-in ballots have "Spawned a mini-industry of consultants who get out the absentee vote, sometimes using questionable techniques." Poor, elderly, and minority communities are most likely to be preyed upon by so-called ballot "Brokers."
Of the 7 million ballots the state sent out in those two elections, some 871,000 ballots are totally unaccounted for.
Use of mail-in ballots more than doubled from 24.9 million in 2004 to 57.2 million in 2016, and around 40% of U.S. votes are now done by mail.
If the current pandemic is going to force the issue during a presidential election, proponents of voting by mail may have to address obvious risks that come with proposing that more than 200 million ballots be mailed out this fall.
"These numbers of missing ballots demonstrate large voter list maintenance failures and security gaps within the broader mail voting process."
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html
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