PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2020-05-21 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did 28 Million Mail-In Ballots Go 'Missing' in Last Four Elections? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • On April 24, 2020, the RealClearPolitics website published an article by Mark Hemingway headlined 28 Million Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections. Drawing on a report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which was in turn drawn from data compiled by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the RealClearPolitics article sought to raise the alarm about the supposed election fraud perils of the mail-in balloting process: The headline and opening of the article, particularly in their use of the word missing, left many readers with the impression that millions and millions of voters expected to receive ballots in the mail that mysteriously never arrived, or filled out and mailed in ballots that simply vanished without ever being counted. But as the EAC observed in response, those 28 million missing ballots were ones that were neither returned undeliverable nor returned from voter -- in other words, ballots mailed out in multiple states over the course of four elections that were not marked and sent back. Declaring such ballots missing is, as many others noted, akin to declaring all the millions of Americans who don't bother showing up at polling places each election (some 40 to 60% of the eligible voting population) as missing: Or, as Pro Publica's Electionland quoted an expert on the subject: But is it true, as RealClearPolitics claims, that The potential to affect elections by chasing down unused mail-in ballots and make sure they get counted – using methods that may or may not be legal – is great and that There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud? As to the former point, the article stated up front that there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently, and as to the latter point, the article offered nothing more than a link to an 8-year-old New York Times article about absentee voting. On the other hand, the National Vote at Home Institute (NVAIH) pointed out that methods for tracking mail-in ballots have become increasingly more widespread and sophisticated: More recent analysis of the vote-by-mail (VBM) process suggests that as with all forms of voter fraud, documented instances of fraud related to VBM are rare: (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url