Some random thoughts and notes regarding paper ballots and election fraud
* There's a huge difference between sending ballots to a small number of citizens who request them and requiring that they be mailed to every registered voter, as Democrats have demanded. Under the Democrats’ plan, ballots are inevitably sent to wrong addresses or inactive voters, putting millions of blank ballots into circulation — an invitation for fraud.
* In 2012, before mail-in voting became a partisan political litmus test, the New York Times published an article titled "Error and Fraud At Issue As Absentee Voting Rises." The piece noted that “there is a bipartisan consensus that voting by mail … is more easily abused than other forms,” and that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.”
* A bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James A. Baker III, concluded in 2005 that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and that “vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”
* Citizens who vote at nursing homes are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation.
* No one questions that mail-in ballots have much higher rates of not being counted. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that in the 2008 presidential election, 7.6 million of 35.5 million mail-in ballots requested were not counted because they never reached voters or were rejected for irregularities.
* The danger of what Democrats call “community ballot collection” (a k a "ballot harvesting"), in which campaign workers collect absentee ballots in bulk and deliver them to election officials, is a recipe for disaster.