Restrictions on mail-in voting reduce voter fraud

What's this about?

People disagree about whether tighter rules for mail voting stop fake or stolen votes.

The key question is whether these rules help more than they hurt.

What supporters say

• Mail votes can use checks that may stop someone from using another person’s name.
• People may pick up, handle, or send in ballots, so focused rules can block these risks.
• Rules about names, marks, vote tracking, and witnesses may catch some fake votes.
• A case in North Carolina showed that a group could misuse mail ballots and force a new vote.

What critics say

• Tough rules for checking marks can wrongly reject real votes from people who voted lawfully.
• Proof of mail vote fraud seems rare, even though some cases have happened.
• Limits may make voting harder without clear proof that they make votes safer.

How to read this

The number of points on each side does not show who is right; check how strong the proof is behind each point.

The bottom line

The proof shows that mail voting has some real risks, and focused safety rules may help.

But broad limits have no clear proof of lowering fraud, while some rules can block real votes.

Restrictions on mail-in voting are often promoted as a way to prevent fraudulent ballots. The evidence, however, distinguishes between rules aimed at specific vulnerabilities and broad limits that may reduce access without showing a clear security benefit.

The case for

Mail voting creates opportunities that do not arise in exactly the same way when voters cast ballots in person. Ballots can be collected by third parties, handled outside official polling places, or submitted using false identities. Those vulnerabilities are real, and some targeted safeguards are logically designed to address them 1.

A peer-reviewed examination of the 2018 North Carolina congressional election found absentee-ballot activity serious enough to invalidate the result and require a new election. Contemporaneous reporting also documented guilty pleas connected to a scheme involving the collection and handling of absentee ballots. The episode does not show that fraud is common, but it demonstrates that organized manipulation is possible. It supports controls on who may collect ballots, how ballots are tracked, who may witness them and how voters’ identities are checked.

Verification rules could also deter or catch some fraudulent submissions. Election-administration reviews identify signature checks, ballot tracking and procedures that allow voters to correct problems as parts of mail-ballot security. Other policy analyses point to identification numbers, witnesses and notarization as possible tools. The strongest argument for restrictions is therefore a design argument: a rule aimed at a documented weakness may reduce one type of fraud, even though the available evidence does not measure how much fraud that rule prevents 2.

The case against

The main problem is that proven mail-ballot fraud appears to be rare. Research reviews from Brookings and the MIT Election Lab describe documented fraud as uncommon. Individual prosecutions show that fraud can happen, but they do not show how often it occurs or prove that a particular restriction would have stopped it 3. No identified study in the evidence compares fraud under different mail-voting rules while accounting for differences in election administration and the voters involved.

Some restrictions create a clearer, documented risk: rejecting valid ballots. Signature review involves subjective judgments, and peer-reviewed studies find that reviewers need careful training and calibration and can make inconsistent or mistaken decisions. Administrative evidence similarly treats verification and ballot-curing procedures as important to accuracy. A stricter signature rule may block a suspicious ballot, but it may also exclude a legitimate voter; the net effect cannot be assumed 4 (see Figure 1).

The evidence also warns against treating added voting requirements as automatically beneficial. Studies of strict identification laws for in-person voting have found participation burdens for some voters and little evidence of an overall turnout benefit. Those findings do not directly measure mail-ballot restrictions, so their relevance is limited. Still, they suggest that broad rules can impose costs without demonstrating a matching security gain 5.

Administrative rejection rates and processing errors should not be treated as direct measures of fraud (see Figure 2). A policy that reduces rejections may improve access or administrative accuracy without affecting fraud. A policy that increases rejections may stop some suspect ballots while also excluding valid ones. The evidence does not provide a common estimate of undetected fraud, a broad comparison of different restrictions or a numerical balance between fraud prevented and valid ballots rejected (see Figure 3).

The bottom line

The evidence does not support the broad claim that restricting mail-in voting reduces fraudulent ballots. It provides a reasonable case for targeted safeguards—such as chain-of-custody controls, ballot tracking, identity verification, witnessing, curing procedures and limits on organized ballot collection—because these measures are tied to specific vulnerabilities.

But that support is based mainly on documented risks and logical connections, not measured reductions in fraud. The stronger evidence concerns the rarity of proven fraud and the fallibility of signature review. Overall, the evidence favors a cautious, targeted approach with moderate confidence, rather than blanket restrictions. The key unanswered question is whether any particular rule prevents enough fraud to outweigh false rejections and the burden placed on legitimate voters.