[EL] Difference between absentee and all mail in balloting

[Charles H Stewart]

At the risk of entering a debate over nomenclature that appears to be at cross purposes, let me provide a perspective, as a social scientist who has been a fly on the wall of election administration for the past twenty years.

Jim defines absentee balloting below as a situation in which a registered voter must apply for a ballot.  The problem is that once states started abandoning the requirement that you be _absent_ on Election Day, the adjective “absentee” no longer applied.  It was as simple as that.  People who are concerned that incorrect adjectives would convey incorrect information about the nature of the policy started encouraging people in “no-excuse absentee” states to stop using the adjective “absentee.”  It’s inaccurate and a misnomer.  A few states, such as Florida, took the clue and changed its statute so that it no longer refers to “absentee” voting and refers to “mail ballots” instead.  (A similar thing is happening these days in thinking about what to describe what Colorado, Oregon, Washington, etc. do.  Because most people in those states return their ballots in person, “vote by mail” doesn’t seem descriptive.  There’s a push to call it “vote at home” instead.)

I, for one, find the NCSL classification of mail/absentee systems to be very useful, and is the one I almost always use, with the caveat that there is a lot of variability within each legal regime.  If people are interested in a useful summary categorizations, rather than weaponizing the admittedly inconsistent use of terminology that describes what is happening when the government mails a voter a ballot, I would encourage people to start there.  The NCSL site, in fact, has a helpful discussion of this nomenclature issue on this page:  https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/absentee-and-early-voting.aspx.

-cs

From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> On Behalf Of James Bopp Jr
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2020 3:45 PM
To: rhasen at law.uci.edu; law-election at uci.edu
Subject: [EL] Difference between absentee and all mail in balloting

I just don't understand why the MSM and the Democrats say " There’s no difference between mail-in voting and absentee ballot voting. "
The big and obvious difference is that, in absentee balloting, the registered voter must apply for the ballot. This contemporaneous application requirement serves many anti-voter fraud purposes.  By requiring an application, the vote must, usually, swear that they are alive, their current address. and that they are still eligible to vote.  Furthermore, this creates an audit trail that is examined by election officials to compare the applications with the subsequent mail in ballot.  This provides substantial protections.

All mail in balloting skips the application and just mails ballots to all voters on voter registration rolls, usually those on the "active" registration roll.  Of course there are two big problems here, first, we lose the benefits of the application, and second, ballots are mailed to many voters who are dead, moved or ineligible, flooding the state with ballots for the unscrupulous to scoop up and vote.

And the Democrats want to mail ballots to those on the "ineligible" registration list.  These are people who have not voted in the last 2 elections and election officials have mailed them a post card that was returned as undeliverable. So more ballots are flooding the state -- sent to people we already know are not there.

Now, it may be that one would like to argue over whether an application is helpful to prevent voter fraud or whether it is prudent to send ballots to addresses of voters we already know are not there, but surely it is indefensible, but maybe from the Democrats perspective useful, to say there is not difference between the two.  Jim Bopp

In a message dated 7/15/2020 11:29:32 AM US Eastern Standard Time, rhasen at law.uci.edu<mailto:rhasen at law.uci.edu> writes:

“Florida GOP doctors Trump tweet to solve mail-in voting problem”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113106>

Posted on July 15, 2020 8:01 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113106> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Politico:<https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/15/florida-mail-in-voting-trump-362519>

President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric against mail-in voting is causing a big problem for Florida Republicans, who once dominated the practice here.

So the state GOP came up with a solution: They doctored one of Trump’s tweets on the issue to remove the stigma.

In a mass-solicitation designed to boost flagging interest in registering to vote by mail, the Republican Party of Florida featured a Trump tweet from June 28 that praised absentee ballots but that had his opposition to mail-in voting strategically edited out.

“Absentee Ballots are fine. A person has to go through a process to get and use them,” Trump said in the tweet<https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1277429217190428673>. The rest of the quote was blurred out: “Mail-In Voting, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt Election is USA history. Bad things happen with Mail-Ins. Just look at Special Election in Patterson, N.J. 19% of Ballots a FRAUD.”

There’s no difference between mail-in voting and absentee ballot voting. Trump is claiming a distinction that does not exist, all the while exaggerating<https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/885074932/n-j-election-fraud-case-draws-a-trump-tweet-but-suggests-safeguards-are-working> the fraud risks, prevalence and effects of voting by mail.
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