Ideas like universal mail-in voting has been suggested by many and has received a lot of attention in the media. Some states like Nevada responded to COVID-19 by have pushing to strengthen mail-in voting. Other states like Texas instead focused on protecting in-person voters from catching the virus. While most Democrats seem to want mail-in voting, most Republicans, including President Trump, are worried about electoral fraud.
Voter impersonation, poll closures, ineligible voting, and many more actions are considered acts of electoral fraud. Electoral fraud typically happens every vote, though some violations may be unintentional. The Heritage Foundation has tracked 1,296 instances of voter fraud since 1980.
But electoral fraud isn’t the only issue. Many experts are saying we won’t have a president declared on Election Day. The postal service was already expecting to have issues delivering the ballots by Election Day, but now that some states are mailing ballots to all “eligible voters,” that stress is guaranteed to increase.
The Trump administration has opposed universal mail-in voting, arguing that no elections in the past have been so reliant on mail-in ballots. President Trump pointed out a common issue likely to happen on Election Day: millions of mail-in votes being rejected. In the primary season alone, more than 550,000 absentee ballots were rejected, and this will only get worse when it comes time for the presidential election. Some worry that people mailing in ballots will also try to vote in-person on Election Day to make sure their vote gets counted.
We don’t know yet for sure if the spike in mail-in voting will cause major harm to vote tallies on Election Day. Both the Biden and Trump campaigns are preparing to wait for weeks to get the results, and assembling legal teams to ensure that their campaigns come out on top. There are no guarantees about the security of our presidential election.
