https://www.aei.org/op-eds/mail-in-voting-could-accidentally-disenfranchise-millions-of-voters/
President Trump is suing Nevada over its recent decision to send absentee ballots to all voters, and warning the country “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.” Trump’s critics argue that there is no evidence that voting by mail results in fraud. Trump is right that mail-in voting is a source of potential voter fraud, especially on the scale that is being proposed. But the bigger problem is not vote fraud — it’s vote failure.
There is plenty of evidence that mail-in voting has the unintended consequence of disenfranchising of millions of eligible voters. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of the 2008 presidential election found that about 3.9 million voters said they requested mail ballots but never received them; 2.9 million ballots that were sent out did not make it back to election officials; and about 800,000 were rejected for a variety of reasons — either because they were postmarked after the election, arrived without a signature, were improperly filled out or did not match voting records. “The pipeline that moves mail ballots between voters and election officials is very leaky,” the study concluded.
More recently, the 2020 Democratic primaries should serve as a cautionary tale. About six weeks after New York’s congressional primaries, winners were not declared in two closely watched House races until Tuesday. That’s thanks to complications in counting the surge of more than 400,000 mail-in ballots, of which state officials have already invalidated 84,000. In California, election officials rejected more than 100,000 mail-in ballots in the state’s March presidential primary. To put these numbers in perspective, Trump won the White House in 2016 thanks to roughly 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin combined. In Pennsylvania alone, mail ballot problems kept about 92,000 people from voting in a primary in a state that Trump won by just 44,000 votes four years ago. In Florida, about 18,500 mail-in ballots were not counted, and in Nevada, about 6,700 were rejected. In a close race, such failures could easily call the results into question.