Do absentee ballots facilitate fraud?

As in the East Chicago case, absentee voting often is connected to municipal elections. Some observers doubt that absentee voting can open the door to fraud pervasive enough to affect anything larger than a local election.

Alan Morrison, a special counsel at the Fair Election Legal Network, a group that tries to remove barriers to voting, said the fact that absentee ballot fraud seems to occur most often in mayoral and city council elections “suggests that that kind of tactic will probably work best in primaries and where there are a relatively small number of people who are voting.”

Morrison doubts that what Pastrick’s supporters did in the 2003 East Chicago mayoral primary — only 10,000 people voted — could be done in a larger, statewide race.

Could a conspiracy be kept secret?
“Just think about what it would take to have a really big influence on absentee ballots,” he said. “You really would have to have an enormous number of people participating in this to make it effective, because the numbers are so large on a statewide basis, certainly in the presidential election.”

In the 2004 presidential election, more than 2.4 million people cast votes in Indiana.  

Morrison added, “Does this mean that people won’t try to get every edge they can? They will, but the more people you get involved in a program like this, the more likely it is that it will be found out — and therefore will undermine the goal they’re trying to achieve.”

As for voters being paid to vote one way or the other, as happened in the East Chicago case, “I suppose it happens,” Morrison said. “But I don’t know why it would be more likely to happen at the absentee ballot stage than at the voting stage, except that the payer can look how you voted and be sure that he is getting his money’s worth. I suppose that’s possible.”

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But he said “it’s hard to believe there’s a lot of that going on today, or that it is likely to affect many elections.”

(Morrison’s group, the Fair Election Legal Network, gets part of its funding from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Education Association. All three of those unions support Obama. Its advisory board includes former Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, who has been a mentor to Obama since the 1990’s, according to National Journal.)

Ultimately, the state legislatures and officials who oversee elections are the defenders of absentee voting integrity.

“If voters want the convenience of absentee balloting, it should be the state's responsibility to figure out a system for ensuring ballot security appropriate to this voting method,” Minnite said.

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