| What do you mean by fraud? By voters? Every investigation of postal ballots have shown it to be very rare. Most problems are simple mistakes. By administrators? Postal balloting is neither more or less prone to cheating than the other electronic voting and tabulation systems. Meaning terrible. Typically, the vulnerable parts are voter registration (eg caging, purges), signature verification, ballot scanning ahead of election day, and adjudication. -- I opposed my state and county switching to all postal balloting. My #1 concern was that it'd disenfranchise more people (eg USPS loses/misdelivers ~1% of all ballots, some ~40k voters have their signatures challenged every election), resulting in reduced turnout and long-term participation. On this I was proven wrong. Turnout increased. Another concern is that postal balloting enables ballot chasing. Which increases the cost of campaigning as well as leads to voter fatigue and alienation. This appears to be true. But as long as turnout remains higher, the tradeoff seems worthwhile. |
Any investigation claiming to have a way to measure fraud is a fraud in itself because it is impossible to measure with any ounce of certainty something based on intent and made in secrecy. Also the norm to contest an election is not to show that there was enough fraud but merely to show that the number of irregular ballots is greater than the margin of victory, proving fraud is irrelevant.
The problem with mail-in voting and other early methods is that it greatly increases the attack surface and is impossible to verify the whole process by normal citizens.The fact that nearly half of the US electorate doubted the results is reason enough to never do that again.