The New York Times sounded awfully confident: “Falsehoods And Facts On Voting By Mail – Trump Claims High Risk Of Fraud. He’s Wrong,” by Stephanie Saul and Reid Epstein. Which makes it incredibly hypocritical that the paper made the opposite argument in 2012, a belief they now label “false.”
Saul and Epstein wrote on Thursday:
With concerns mounting over how the country can conduct elections during a pandemic and Democrats pressing for alternatives to in-person voting, President Trump has begun pushing a false argument that has circulated among conservatives for years -- that voting by mail is a recipe for fraud.
“Mail ballots, they cheat,” Mr. Trump said at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. “Mail ballots are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters. They go collect them. They are fraudulent in many cases. They have to vote. They should have voter ID, by the way.”
The reporters smugly asserted:
Here’s a look at the facts on the matter.
All voter fraud is extremely rare.
They made a limited admission, then quickly hedged it:
Even so, experts say that the mail voting system is more vulnerable to fraud than voting in person.
“What we know can be boiled down to this: Voting fraud in the United States is rare, less rare is fraud using mail ballots,” said Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
....
“They’re stories, they’re dramatic, they are rare,” said Mr. Stewart, a professor of political science who studies the machinations of voting.
....
....Some Republicans have long argued against voting by mail and in favor of tightening voter identification and registration requirements, asserting that easing restrictions invites voter fraud.
That’s exactly what the Times used to think, as shown in Adam Liptak’s "Error and Fraud at Issue As Absentee Voting Rises” that made the front page in October 2012, emphasizing the potential for fraud around mail-in/absentee ballots.
On the morning of the primary here in August, the local elections board met to decide which absentee ballots to count. It was not an easy job.
The board tossed out some ballots because they arrived without the signature required on the outside of the return envelope. It rejected one that said “see inside” where the signature should have been....
....
Scenes like this will play out in many elections next month, because Florida and other states are swiftly moving from voting at a polling place toward voting by mail....
....
The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.
In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time....
The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy....
Not anymore -- at least not since Trump started making an issue of it.
