28 Million Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections

Although there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which compiled the public data provided from the Election Assistance Commission, says that the sheer volume of them raises serious doubts about election security.

A significant increase in mail-in voting this fall could greatly incentivize “ballot harvesting,” where third parties collect mail-in ballots on behalf of voters and deliver them to election officials. There’s long been a consensus that such a practice incentivizes fraud, and ballot harvesting is illegal in most of the country. Public debate over the issue has intensified in recent years after a GOP operative in North Carolina was indicted for crimes related to ballot harvesting in 2018.

That same election cycle California legalized ballot harvesting, and observers say the practice played a key role in ousting several Republican congressmen in Orange County in 2018, a longstanding GOP stronghold in a state that has become very liberal in recent decades.  

There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud. A 2012 report in The New York Times noted that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots “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.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html#!