Postal Voting in the US

Last week, I commented on the likelihood of fraud in postal voting on WBOY TV and The Watchdog radio. My main takeaways were:

• Fraud occurs in large elections, but in the US it is rarely large-scale, systematic, or decisive;
• Claims of widespread fraud in the US are usually built from the logical fallacy of taking an isolated example and asserting that it is occurring everywhere;
• All methods of voting have vulnerabilities, including postal voting, but election administration has built-in methods to mitigate the risk of fraud;
• During a pandemic, with a highly contagious disease like COVID-19, the costs to society of voting in-person outweigh the costs of voting by mail. 

During the radio interview, we also talked about reforms in West Virginia that should be considered by the legislature, including consistent publication of polling station results and a deliberative process to consider adopting more postal voting.