Bill Oxford, CHUYN
1056040092
Recently, President Donald Trump tweeted some almost-good advice: “To make sure your Ballot COUNTS, sign & send it in EARLY. When Polls open, go to your Polling Place to see if it was COUNTED. IF NOT, VOTE! Your signed Ballot will not count because your vote has been posted.”
Twitter flagged the tweet, stating that it violated its rules on civic and election integrity. Journalists dissected the advice therein and declared that Trump was encouraging people to vote twice, which is illegal. But a minor revision to Trump’s tweet would have made it accurate and (dare we say) useful in this pandemic election year, when so many are afraid to vote in person and when Trump and others are in full freakout about the specter of mail-in voting fraud.
First, the TL;DR on voter fraud: It’s super rare. In 2007, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice published research on voter fraud, finding that widespread allegations of voter fraud are often exaggerated. Most cases were traced to incidents of clerical errors or inaccurate “matching,” the practice of comparing voter rolls to one another or to other documents and finding alleged double voters or dead voters. The report looked at “notorious election fraud ‘hot spots,’” or places where “various election irregularities led to inflated claims of widespread fraud.” Missouri was a hot spot.
The researchers found that, in some ways, the voter fraud witch hunt began in Missouri, during the 2000 election. Three weeks before the election, Senate candidate Governor Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash, but because of a state law that prohibited changes to a ballot within a month of an election, his name remained. Voters elected him, delivering defeat to then-Senator John Ashcroft. “Dead candidates, dead voters, swirled in the imagination,” the Brennan Center said in a separate piece that examined the history of voter fraud allegations. Missouri’s other senator, Kit Bond, stated that the election was stolen by “a major criminal enterprise designed to defraud voters” when a court ordered that some polls stay open for an additional two hours.
Yet the Brennan Center found only six substantiated cases of voter fraud in Missouri, a rate of 0.0003 percent. All told, the Brennan Center noted, it’s more likely that an American will be struck by lightning than impersonate someone at the polls.
What about mail-in voting? For years, multiple states, including Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, have used the mail as their primary voting mechanism, and there, too, the Brennan Center found low levels of fraud. Since 2000, Oregon has issued about 100 million mail-in ballots. It has only documented a dozen cases of proven fraud. “It is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud,” the Brennan Center concluded.
That’s not to say that fraud isn’t serious and never happens. Eric Fey is the Democratic director at the St. Louis County Board of Elections. He says that he personally has never encountered or heard of voter impersonation in St. Louis County. “If there’s going to be fraud at a polling place, it would almost have to be in cahoots with the poll workers,” he says. “There would have to be some kind of conspiracy of sorts, which is very unlikely, though there have been instances of that across the country.”
Fey, however, points out a recent case of alleged absentee voting fraud in the county. In the leadup to the April 2018 municipal election, Berkeley Mayor Theodore Hoskins was accused of submitting false absentee voter applications. “We started seeing applications for absentee ballots come in, in bunches, from the same source,” Fey remembers. “That’s always a red flag.” His office contacted local law enforcement, who placed the mayor under surveillance. In November 2019, Hoskins was charged with four counts of committing an election offense and one forgery count.
But Fey stresses that this example shows that there are adequate checks built into the system. Mail-in ballots must be notarized, and personal identification information is included. The ballot envelopes feature barcodes for tracking purposes, which also means that duplicates can be discarded. Signatures are verified.
Fey also points out that state law requires a bipartisan team to open mail-in ballots. “Democrats and Republicans sit across the table from each other, they call the name off the list, they open the envelope, they take the ballot out, they make sure that everything is copacetic with the ballot,” he says. “I would say it’s a very safe and secure process.”
So back to Trump’s tweet. The inclusion of one additional step would clear up the president’s instructions: spoiling the mail-in ballot.
Let’s say a voter gets nervous that she mailed her ballot too late. In the absence of an online tracking system, she goes to a polling place on Election Day. She doesn’t mention that she requested a mail-in ballot to the poll worker. Her plan, despite the good intentions, would still be foiled.
Gary Stoff, the city’s Republican director of elections, explains: “If we look up the voter in the Poll Pad, it will show the poll worker that an absentee or mail-in ballot was requested and was mailed, but it will also reflect that the ballot has not yet been returned.”
The voter could then surrender her absentee or mail-in ballot, a process called spoiling the ballot, Stoff explains. Election officials would then reissue to her a new ballot.
“The only vote that would count would be the ballot that they voted at their polling place on Election Day,” Stoff says.
Fey confirms a similar process in the county, which will have a ballot-tracking system for voters to use to ensure that their ballots arrive on time: “Just mechanically speaking, it will not let the poll workers give that person another ballot.”
So what are officials worried about come November 3?
“If there’s, God forbid, a spike with COVID in October, we worry about a lot of poll workers’ canceling, buildings’ not being available for us to use as polling places, and our staff contracting COVID,” Fey says. “Then we’re not able to process everything in a timely manner.”
Missouri law requires bipartisan polling places—they have to include an equal number of Republican and Democratic workers. Recruiting, even in non-pandemic times, is a challenge. Especially difficult, because of the numbers and the political makeup of the city and parts of the county, is getting an adequate number of Republican poll workers. Because of COVID-19, both Fey and Stoff would like to have a healthy reserve of alternatives from both political parties in case of illness.
Stoff says he’d take volunteers right up until the end of October. “We probably wouldn’t have time to train them to be an election judge, but we can still utilize them in some other capacity, such as assisting with maintaining social distancing,” he says.
Fey’s ask is a little more direct: “If you have any Republican friends who want to work the polls, please tell them that St. Louis County could use them.”
Plan ahead
Election Day is November 3. For more information on voting in person or by mail, visit either stlouis-mo.gov or stlouiscountymo.gov.
Mail-in versus absentee ballots
To prevent the spread of COVID-19, Governor Mike Parson signed a bill allowing mail-in ballots in the August 4 primary and November 3 general election. Here are the differences between absentee and mail-in voting.
Mail-in
Ballot requests sent by mail must be received by the election authority no later than 5 p.m. on October 21.
Mail-in ballots must be notarized, returned in the correct, provided envelope, and received by the election authority—not just postmarked—by 7 p.m. on November 3.
In the case of the August primary, in the St. Louis area, nearly 1,000 ballots arrived too late to be counted. Thomas Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of the Postal Service, urges Missourians who want to vote by mail to do so by October 27 to give the service enough time to deliver the marked-up ballots to election officials by November 3.
Absentee
Missourians who wish to vote absentee must meet one of these seven criteria:
1. They’ll be out of town on Election Day
2. They’re unable to vote in person on Election Day due to illness or physical disability (no notary required)
3. They cannot vote in person because of religious belief or practice
4. They’re working the polls at a location other than their polling place
5. They’re incarcerated (provided all qualifications for voting are retained)
6. They’re participants in the address confidentiality program
7. They’re sick with COVID-19 or in a COVID-19 risk category (no notary required)
Voters may request absentee ballots from their local election authority in person, by mail, or by e-mail. Ballot requests must be made by 5 p.m. on October 21.
Voters can cast their absentee ballots at their local election authority until 5 p.m. on November 2.
