Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and voter fraud expert, told us that while he is not aware of any valid statistics on the prevalence of fraud in mail-in ballots, “I do collect anecdotal reports, and it is clear (and I think most observers from across the political spectrum agree) that misconduct in the mail voting process is meaningfully more prevalent than misconduct in the process of voting in person.”
One of the problems with tracking the prevalence of mail-in voting fraud is that “It’s really hard to find,” Atkeson said in a phone interview. “The fact is, we really don’t know how much fraud there is.”
There are two features of mail-in voting that make it “slightly less secure” than in-person voting, Minnite said.
First, she said, “the ‘chain-of-custody’ of the ballot is broken with mail-in voting because the ballot is released by election authorities into the U.S. mail, and voters, therefore, are unsupervised when they vote, they do not record their votes in the presence of election officials.”
Second, she said, “this creates an opening for illegal activity by political operatives that would not otherwise exist if all voting was conducted in-person at official polling sites.”