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Vote-by-mail benefits neither party and is nearly fraud-free, new studies find

Vote by mail ballot
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Voting by mail does not help Democrats more than Republicans and does not incubate fraud — but does generate a bit more turnout, a pair of academic studies out Thursday conclude.

The twin reports, one from Stanford and the other from the Union of Concerned Scientists, come as the debate about making elections more flexible in the face of the coronavirus has become increasingly partisan.


Although voting in person, the method used by three-quarters of Americans before this year, currently poses serious health risks to both voters and poll workers, President Trump is opposing efforts to broadly expand absentee balloting by November. He says the GOP will suffer and that a wave of widespread cheating will be the major reason.

There's no evidence of such partisan advantage in the detailed results from the past dozen elections in California, Utah and Washington. They were analyzed by the Democracy and Polarization Lab at Stanford, which chose the states because each steadily expanded voting by mail, county by county, in the last two decades so that it is now nearly universally used.

The data showed "a truly negligible effect" on partisan turnout rates when comparing the counties with and without the system, the researchers said. The effect on partisan vote share was similarly indistinguishable from zero. But the switch did boost turnout modestly across the board in each state, by 1.9 to 2.4 percentage points.

The data includes every election from 1996 to 2018, so the results could not be more current.

The effort to debunk the view that mail balloting fuels election fraud was conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists with researchers at UCLA and the University of New Mexico. "Voter fraud in U.S. elections continues to be extremely low, and people should not be forced to put their health at risk to exercise their right to vote," their report concluded.

The report was based on an exhaustive aggregation of government and nonprofit group studies about election crime going back four decades. It made extensive use of a database of cases between 1982 and this spring assembled by the Heritage Foundation, the premier conservative think tank. It has found just 207 fraudulent absentee ballot cases out of 1,277 instances of credible voter fraud — or 16 percent of the total.

The social scientists noted that in Oregon, the first of five states to institute a system where every voter is proactively sent a mail-in ballot for every primary and general election, more than 2 million votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election — and after investigating 56 cases of possible fraud, the state concluded just 10 ballots were cast in violation of state criminal law.

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Independent Voters Just Got Power in Nevada – if the Governor Lets It Happen

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Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash. Unplash+ license obtained by IVN Editor Shawn Griffiths.

Independent Voters Just Got Power in Nevada – if the Governor Lets It Happen

CARSON CITY, NEV. - A surprise last-minute bill to open primary elections to Nevada’s largest voting bloc, registered unaffiliated voters, moved quickly through the state legislature and was approved by a majority of lawmakers on the last day of the legislative session Monday.

The bill, AB597, allows voters not registered with a political party to pick between a Republican and Democratic primary ballot in future election cycles. It does not apply to the state’s presidential preference elections, which would remain closed to registered party members.

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In April 2025, the SAVE Act has been reintroduced in the 119th Congress and passed the House, with a much stronger chance of becoming law given the current political landscape.

SDI Productions

The SAVE Act: Addressing a Non-Existent Problem at the Cost of Voter Access?

In July 2024, I wrote about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act when it was first introduced in Congress. And Sarah and I discussed it in an episode of Beyond the Bill Number which you can still listen to. Now, in April 2025, the SAVE Act has been reintroduced in the 119th Congress and passed the House, with a much stronger chance of becoming law given the current political landscape. It's time to revisit this legislation and examine its implications for American voters.

Read the IssueVoter analysis of the bill here for further insight and commentary.

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Independent Voters Gain Ground As New Mexico Opens Primaries
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Independent Voters Gain Ground As New Mexico Opens Primaries

With the stroke of a pen, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham enfranchised almost 350,000 independent voters recently by signing a bill for open primaries. Just a few years ago, bills to open the primaries were languishing in the state legislature, as they have historically across the country. But as more and more voters leave both parties and declare their independence, the political system is buckling. And as independents begin to organize and speak out, it’s going to continue to buckle in their direction.

In 2004, there were 120,000 independent voters in New Mexico. A little over 10 years later, when the first open primary bill was introduced, that number had more than doubled. That bill never even got a hearing. But today the number of independents in New Mexico and across the country is too big to ignore. Independents are the largest group of voters in ten states and the second-largest in most others. That’s putting tremendous pressure on a system that wasn’t designed with them in mind.

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Stopping the Descent Toward Banana Republic Elections

President Trump’s election-related executive order begins by pointing out practices in Canada, Sweden, Brazil, and elsewhere that outperform the U.S. But it is Trump’s order itself that really demonstrates how far we’ve fallen behind. In none of the countries mentioned, or any other major democracy in the world, would the head of government change election rules by decree, as Trump has tried to do.

Trump is the leader of a political party that will fight for control of Congress in 2026, an election sure to be close, and important to his presidency. The leader of one side in such a competition has no business unilaterally changing its rules—that’s why executive decrees changing elections only happen in tinpot dictatorships, not democracies.

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