Roughly 28 million mail-in ballots have gone missing across the country over the last 10 years based on a report citing government figures.
“Elections in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 saw more than 28.3 million ‘unaccounted for’ mail ballots,” analysis from the Public Interest Legal Foundation concluded based on data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The report also determined that more than 1 million ballots were sent to the wrong address in 2018 alone.
“Putting the election in the hands of the United States Postal Service would be a catastrophe,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “Over the recent decade, there were 28 million missing and misdirected ballots. These represent 28 million opportunities for someone to cheat.”
“Absentee ballot fraud is the most common; the most expensive to investigate; and can never be reversed after an election. The status quo was already bad for mail balloting. The proposed emergency fix is worse,” he said.
A court briefing filed earlier this month showed that thousands of ineligible voters, including dead people, are eligible to receive mail-in ballots in New Mexico.
“This is not a theoretical threat: An automatic all-mail election will send thousands of ballots to identified dead, duplicate, outdated, and other problematic addresses,” Adams said about that discrepancy.
“We know from our data that New Mexico’s voter roll is not maintained to the standard needed for an automatic, all-mail election,” he added. “There are concrete solutions, but rushing headlong to vote-by-mail is not one of them.”
States across the country have been grappling with deciding whether to switch to all mail-in voting to combat the spread of the coronavirus at the polls.
The Heritage Foundation compiled a list in 2019 documenting more than 1,000 voter fraud cases resulting in 938 criminal convictions across 47 states.
