Vote-by-mail security in the age of COVID-19
A recent Houston Chronicle article detailed the dispute between the Harris County Clerk, Chris Hollins, and the Texas Elections Director, Keith Ingram. Hollins, with the backing of the Harris County Commissioners, is laying the groundwork to expand access to vote-by-mail (VBM) by taking the seemingly uncontroversial step of mailing out application forms to every voter in Harris County. That form, which anybody can download, print, and return themselves, offers checkboxes for why you are requesting VBM. Texas requires you to select one of these excuses, unlike many other states that allow anybody to vote by mail.
Does this “open the door to vote harvesters and potential fraud”? Let’s look at some actual facts about voter fraud in Texas.
At a hearing of the Texas Senate Select Committee on Election Security, at which I testified in February 2018 (my written testimony, video starting around 4:20:00), Brantley Starr, then with the Office of the Attorney General, testified that there was one voter in Starr County who somehow managed to cast three votes after having passed away. That case was still under further investigation. Starr stated that his office was additionally investigating complex cases with “entire organizations that are perpetrating voter fraud” (video, starting around 2:14:00.)
Jonathan White, also from the Attorney General’s office, made reference to “politiqueros, what we call vote harvesters down in South Texas” who apparently paid $10–20 each to fake voters, who they transported to the polls along with fake voter registration certificates, purchased from a corrupt employee of the elections office. (A few months later, three people were arrested.) White also made reference to mail ballot fraud as a “well-kept secret … of certain political communities”, noting that legislation over the past decade has improved the situation, but he felt that mail ballot fraud is still the “Wild West” and pointed to a number of other counties beyond the Rio Grande Valley. Claimed White, “95% of election fraud exists in the vast unknown, and never comes to light.” For example, “in Dallas County, they found 700 … applications for mail ballots … in West Dallas, all in the same handwriting; all the signatures were forged.” Most of these cases come to the attention of prosecutors by virtue of somebody noticing something unusual, rather than through any systemic, ongoing investigation.
White reached an interesting conclusion: “voting is on the honor system, and it always has been.” Prospective voters will be confused. They’ll make mistakes. They’ll check boxes that they shouldn’t have checked, and voter registrars aren’t necessarily going to catch these mistakes, much less uncover systemic frauds in real time. As an example, White also pointed to 161 voters having been removed from the voter rolls, by virtue of not being citizens, after having retrospectively cast 100 ballots.
So how bad is it? How much actual election fraud is there? The Texas Attorney General’s office notes that there have been 457 successful prosecutions of election fraud offenses since 2004. They also point to 97 prosecuted violations in 2018 alone, albeit without telling us how many of those prosecutions were successful.
What conclusions can we draw from this? Voter fraud does happen, whether in person or by mail, and it’s getting caught. What we don’t know, in any quantitative way, is whether there’s a large enough volume of fraud to influence the outcomes of our elections, whether statewide or local. It’s certainly easier to imagine this sort of individual, ballot-by-ballot fraud paying off for low-turnout local elections than big statewide races.
So what happens if we increase the volume of mail ballots? Does it necessarily increase vote harvesting and fraud? Most likely, it will just move around the fraud that’s already happening. To a “politiquero” working with a corrupt election official to invent false voter registrations, mail ballots might streamline their process, but it will also leave a literal paper trail. Little known fact: mail ballot envelopes include barcodes that allow those envelopes to be tracked as they move through the postal system. This would yield exceptionally valuable data for a criminal investigator.
Now, if we were considering a permanent transition to voting by mail, as they do in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington State, we would need to think these issues through quite carefully. However, that’s not what’s under discussion. The issue at hand is protecting voters from the risks of COVID-19. Assuming that effective vaccines become available in 2021, this is really a one-time issue, specifically for this November’s election, a little more than two months away.
Probably the biggest fraud risk would be spousal coercion. (“I filled out your ballot for you; just sign your envelope and I’ll mail them both in.”) And for that reason, under normal circumstances, I generally prefer voting in a real polling place. However, COVID-19 changes the risk calculus. The election this November is exceptionally important, particularly with the tight polling in our state, and the once-a-decade redistricting to follow. We must be willing to relax our concerns over what appears to be a very small volume of voting fraud, if it then enables a large volume of additional, legitimate votes.
At this point, the hardest challenge for Harris County, even without Ingram standing in the way, would be to get all those applications processed, order the printed ballots, and get them to voters on time. Ingram needs to assist our county election officials and he should support our voters, rather than forcing them to risk their lives to exercise the most important privilege of citizenship: the right to vote. Yes, there will be new challenges to mitigate the risks of voting fraud, but those challenges are secondary to the primary importance of voting itself.
