The Differences Between Absentee and All-Mail Voting

Over the last few months, President Trump and conservatives have been raising awareness of mail-in ballots and their susceptibility to fraud. However, Trump plans to vote absentee this year.

A question that one might ask is, how can these two positions can be reconciled?

The Daily Signal highlights the differences between the two processes.

Absentee balloting is usually reserved for people who cannot make it to the polls due to “illness, travel, military service, or residence on a college campus.” In absentee balloting, a voter requests the ballot and usually has to sign and authenticate a formal request. Different states have different ways of identifying the voter.

As such, the potential for fraud is low, if not non-existent.

However, with all-mail voting, the ballot is just sent to the prospective voter, regardless of if they requested it or not. Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation said regarding all-mail voting that, “With all-mail [voting], they just send out a ballot and without certainty it’s going to a live voter. The problem with all-mail voting is that ballots are mailed to every registered voter. We know voter registration rolls are in bad shape all across the country, with multiple duplications and sending out ballots to people that don’t live there.”

As well, in 2005, the Commission on Federal Election Reform determined that the biggest source of election fraud were absentee ballots.

You can read more from the Daily Signal’s analysis here.