All through the 2020 presidential election, as President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked voting by mail as susceptible to fraud (it’s not),
All through the 2020 presidential election, as President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked voting by mail as susceptible to fraud (it’s not), he has additionally taken pains to differentiate between “voting by mail” and “absentee voting.”
Provided that Trump himself is voting absentee in 2020, this hair-splitting on his half isn’t precisely surprising. However Trump’s particular claims — that absentee voting and “voting by mail” are by some means completely different, and that absentee voters “need to undergo an entire course of” completely different from that for mail voters — are price addressing.
The quick model is that there’s no agency distinction between absentee voting and voting by mail. There’s a colloquial distinction between the 2, however not a authorized one. And there’s no cause to assume “voting by mail,” insofar because it informally refers to one thing completely different from “absentee voting,” is susceptible to fraud or different issues.
The distinction between voting by mail and absentee voting
“Voting by mail” is usually used to confer with voting within the 5 states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah — the place all elections are carried out fully by mail, and within the states of California, Nebraska, and North Dakota, the place counties have the choice to decide on to conduct elections fully by mail.
This yr, California goes a step additional because of Covid-19 and mailing ballots to each eligible voter, although some polling locations will stay open. In Nebraska, the place state legislation solely permits counties with beneath 10,000 individuals to mandate common voting by mail, 11 counties can be doing so; this yr, Douglas, Sarpy and Lancaster counties, the three most populous within the state, are sending poll request types (however not precise ballots) to each voter.
Just a few states that aren’t historically vote-by-mail states are sending out ballots to all registered and/or eligible voters this yr because of the distinctive circumstances of the pandemic. These states are New Jersey, Vermont, and Nevada, plus the District of Columbia.
“Absentee voting,” against this, tends for use to confer with voting by mail in states or counties the place the apply will not be already common. In most states the place vote by mail isn’t common, absentee voting is out there for any cause — that’s, voters don’t want to supply an excuse for why they aren’t voting in individual — at the very least within the 2020 election, because of the pandemic.
This no-excuse absentee voting is out there in main swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In 9 states — Iowa, Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, Maryland, Delaware, Illinois, Connecticut, and New Mexico — each registered voter is getting mailed an absentee poll software, making them much like the states mailing precise ballots to everybody, albeit with an additional step within the course of.
However some states require excuses to vote absentee. The New York Instances’s Juliette Love, Matt Stevens, and Lazaro Gamio appeared up the state legal guidelines on this and notice that Texas, New York, Indiana, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi all require sure excuses for voters to obtain absentee ballots. The justifications the states will settle for fluctuate extensively, per the Nationwide Council of State Legislatures. As an illustration, having a piece shift throughout voting hours is a legitimate cause to request an absentee poll in South Carolina and Louisiana, however not in Texas or New York. Some states — South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Indiana — permit seniors above a sure age (often 65) to request absentee ballots while not having one other excuse.
Trump’s claims about absentee voting and vote-by-mail fraud are incorrect
In each absentee voting and “vote by mail,” insofar as they’re in any respect completely different, voter fraud is uncommon. One cause for this are the steps states to make fraud all however unattainable — for instance, again in 2019, the Pacific Normal’s Spenser Mestel defined Oregon’s course of for verifying ballots in its all-mail system:
In Oregon, each the absentee envelope and poll have a barcode distinctive to every voter, and within the bigger counties, like Marion, a machine scans for any discrepancies between the 2, or any duplicate barcodes. Then, a crew of election employees skilled in forensic handwriting analyzes the poll signatures to confirm the identification of the voter, who has two weeks to show her id ought to the signature be contested.
Throughout this course of, “the whole lot that’s occurring is on digital camera always,” says Tayleranne Gillespie, the communications director for the Oregon Secretary of State. “Nobody’s ever by themselves counting ballots. It’s at all times finished in bipartisan groups.”
It’s additionally necessary to notice that, opposite to common perception, absentee ballots don’t “solely depend” if an election is shut. They’re typically the final ballots to be counted, so typically blowout elections are “known as” by information providers earlier than each absentee poll is tallied up. However all votes are counted finally. Ballots that may have eligibility issues (if, say, ballot employees can’t verify a voter is registered to vote) are generally categorized as “provisional ballots,” that are counted after being investigated. However that’s a definite problem from absentee ballots.
In brief: Absentee and vote by mail are principally the identical factor, each have low charges of fraud, and one of many two can be accessible to the overwhelming majority of American voters on November 3, 2020.
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