Vote By Mail Is Safe—For Now

The useful part

Voting by mail is convenient, secure, and often the only option for voters in the military or who have disabilities. Studies show that universal vote by mail can dramatically increase turnout. Barbara Smith Warner is a senior advisor at the Institute for Responsive Government and the former executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute.

How it works

• When you think about how voting at home started, you think of rural areas, you think of seniors, you think of people who are disabled.
• If I'm a health care worker, I don't know what kind of shift I'm going to be working around Election Day.
• One of the best things you can do as a health care worker, as any sort of a shift worker, or as a working person or working parent, is vote at home.
• I have a history with the letter carriers' union, so that was really the most striking part of this that did not get enough attention—that this is a foundational change in how the Postal Service works.
• What is worse is the Postal Service acquiescing and coming up with this complete change of how it does mail.

What to take from it

Voter lists tend to be very clean in the universal vote-at-home states because you're regularly mailing and keeping up your lists. There's no such thing as copying a ballot and stuffing a ballot box because every ballot is tied to a single voter. If something is wrong with your ballot, you are notified in almost every state by your election administrator: "Hey, you forgot to date this, or your signature doesn't match." The truth is that fraud is not a problem.

Example or evidence

• A study that came out after the 2020 election by Mindy Romero and Eric McGee came to the conclusion that [voting at home increased turnout by five and a half percentage points].
• So the idea that the Postal Service was going to be an arbiter of what ballots could be mailed is mind-blowing to anyone who has been around the Postal Service at any point in their life.
• Phil Keisling is a former secretary of state for the State of Oregon, the founder of the National Vote at Home Institute, and a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly.
• "Absentee ballots," the name it's often gone by, started in the Civil War as a way to help soldiers on the front participate in the democracy that they were fighting to defend.

Details worth keeping

In 2024, absentee ballots accounted for more than 48 million votes, according to the States United Democracy Center, and in eight states and the District of Columbia ("universal vote-at-home states"), elections are held exclusively by mail. Yet President Donald Trump's relentless attacks on vote by mail (despite his own record as a mail-in voter) threaten to jeopardize access to this option, as well as public trust, say two of the nation's foremost experts on vote by mail. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Related coverage

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