Fraud linked to in-person early voting seen as rarity
The claim: “We don’t need to have this early voting. The election day should be a national holiday, but when you hear people talk about, we can extend (the early voting period by) two days, seven days, two weeks … it just opens it up for this chicanery and this fraud that we’re seeing.”
Texas Republican Party Chairman Allen West made this remark during a radio appearance in which he suggested that early voting should be eliminated.
PolitiFact rating: False. There’s no evidence indicating that early voting is any more or less risky than Election Day voting.
A database of documented voter fraud cases maintained by the right-leaning Heritage Foundation shows that fraud tied to in-person early voting is exceedingly rare. Among the 1,298 instances of fraud recorded since 1982, 208 cases involved absentee ballots and around 10 cases were directly tied to early in-person voting.
Discussion
On the day after Election Day, West joined conservative talk radio host Rick Roberts on the air to express concerns about Joe Biden’s lead over President Donald Trump after mail-in ballots in several battleground states were tallied.
West’s grievances over absentee ballots were similar to the claims made by some Republicans since Election Day — that the record numbers of mail-in ballots led to widespread voter fraud that allowed Democrats to steal the election from Trump. (No evidence has yet been uncovered proving these claims.)
But West takes the claims of fraud further by not just casting aspersions on mail-in voting. He goes on to say, without citing evidence, that early in-person voting also invites fraud.
It’s not the first time West attacked early voting. In September, he and a handful of Republican officials sued Gov. Greg Abbott over his decision to extend early voting by six days amid the coronavirus pandemic.
West and the other Republicans argued that Abbott’s move defied the Texas Election Code, which states that “early voting by personal appearance begins on the 17th day before Election Day and continues through the fourth day before Election Day.”
The suit, which was rejected by the state Supreme Court, did not suggest that extending early voting would open the voting process to fraud, as West claimed recently.
Claims that voting by mail has led to widespread voter fraud have also been widely scrutinized and repeatedly debunked.
“Of the minuscule level of
voter fraud cases that have been documented, more are associated with absentee/voting by mail than with early in-person voting and with precinct place voting,” said Paul Gronke, a professor and the director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College. “But I have to stress that the overall level is minuscule, and nearly all the documented cases have to deal with tens of ballots and in local elections.”
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, maintains an Election Fraud Database — a compendium of voter fraud cases that have resulted in convictions. Although the list is not exhaustive, the foundation says it is “intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is commit
ted.”
Between 1982 and 2020, the foundation has recorded 1,298 instances of voter fraud that have resulted in 1,121 criminal convictions. Fewer than 100 were reported in Texas. The category with the most cases is ineligible voting, with 269 cases recorded, followed by 208 cases involving absentee ballots. Around 10 cases, or about 1 percent of all cases documented in the database,
were directly tied to the exploitation of early inperson voting.
Two common ways people attempted fraud via early voting was by crossing state lines to submit duplicate ballots or by mailing an absentee ballot and then voting again in person.
But there are safeguards against such measures, Gronke said. Modern election systems assign absentee ballots with a unique identifier and barcode tying the ballot to a voter. If that voter attempted to vote again in person, their name would be flagged. In Texas, each county is responsible for securing mail ballots this way.
States can also secure elections against interstate duplicative voting by joining the Electronic Voter Registration Information Center, a consortium of states that share and cross-reference voter registration information. This year, Texas became the 30th state to join the consortium.
“ERIC does very sophisticated matching,” Gronke said. “It checks death records, it checks national change-of-address records from the Postal Service, then it compares (voter information) across states.”
In the years after the founding of the U.S., voting was held over several days to give rural citizens time to travel to the polls.
But in 1845, the federal government restricted presidential voting to a single day to prevent people from crossing state lines to vote more than once, according to University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald.
Early voting returned during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln extended absentee voting to soldiers in his 1864 race against George McClellan. Absentee voting practices expanded during the 20th century as states adopted mail-in voting laws.
Texas became one of the pioneering states for early in-person voting when the Legislature allowed it in 1987 in addition to absentee voting. In the 1988 presidential election, about 20 percent of votes in Texas were cast early. Its popularity has grown steadily since. This year, a record 57 percent of registered voters cast early ballots.