By Meg McIntyre, Granite State News Collaborative
With most states, including New Hampshire, offering expanded voting options this November in light of COVID-19, some have raised concerns around potential vulnerabilities in vote-by-mail systems, from voter impersonation to ballot box stuffing.
But research has shown that in general, intentional voter fraud is exceedingly rare, and officials say the Granite State has safeguards in place to prevent it.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, the vast majority of reported voter impersonation fraud can be attributed to clerical errors or bad data matching practice. The center found that actual voter fraud — defined as when “individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system” — occurs at rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.
There is also negligible evidence that fraud is more prevalent via mail-in voting. In Oregon, the first state to enact universal voting by mail, a Brookings Institute analysis found that there were 14 fraudulent votes attempted by mail between 2000 and 2019. More than 15,000,000 ballots were cast in Oregon during that period.
Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said New Hampshire’s absentee voting system lays out a clear chain of custody so that the state is aware of every person who has handled an absentee ballot from the time it is printed to when it is returned.
Unlike in some states, Granite Staters must also have a reason for requesting an absentee ballot, and ballots can only be returned by voters or state-approved “delivery agents” such as family members and nursing home administrators.
Anna Brown, director of research and analysis at the nonpartisan nonprofit organization Citizens Count, said the Granite State may also be less vulnerable to potential fraud than other states because of its largely analog voting system. New Hampshire residents cannot register to vote online.
“In New Hampshire, it is very difficult to pull off any sort of coordinated voter fraud like that, because we rely so much on paper ballots and on interactions with your local town clerk,” Brown said. “And everything can be traced; it’s not happening all online in the background. It’s basically a very unhackable system.”
Brown noted that investigations of potential voter fraud in New Hampshire by the Secretary of State’s Office and the N.H. Attorney General produced no evidence of widespread fraud in recent Granite State elections.
Scanlan said that if New Hampshire were to mail every voter an absentee ballot or allow jusr anyone to drop an absentee ballot off on behalf of someone else, as is the case in some other states, it could affect some voters’ confidence in the election results.
“Even if there is nothing nefarious going on with that process, it causes some people to question how those ballots are handled, and whether the results of them after being counted are accurate,” Scanlan said.
He said he looks at keeping an election secure as a balancing act.
“There is a tension between making voting really easy and making sure that you have enough security measures to maintain that confidence in the election. So the easier you make voting, the less safe it may appear,” he said.
“The more safe you make it, the more difficult it may be to cast a ballot.”
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