What if mail-in voting is here to stay?
By Ran Canetti and Gabe Kaptchuk. Originally featured on BUToday’s What If Series.
In the 2020 election, approximately 46 percent of the national population cast their ballot by mail, up from 24 percent in 2016. Do we want voting from home to stick around?
Before attempting an answer, let’s recall what we would like voting systems to guarantee: foremost, the results must correctly reflect the votes cast. Closely related are the guarantees that all and only eligible voters can cast votes. The mechanism that ensures these properties must also be transparent and simple enough to be convincing to everyone, even to the losing parties. Another crucial property is that coercing voters should be difficult: ballots should contain the voter’s true preference. Finally, voters from all backgrounds and communities should find it equally easy to cast their votes.
Voting online or by email might seem convenient and easy, but experts have grown wary of trusting retail computers with sensitive tasks like national elections. In particular, digital systems make it difficult for voters to verify their ballot’s correctness and are vulnerable to hackers and software bugs. Voting by mail, on the other hand, is a battle-tested mechanism that allows for auditing (a “paper trail”), a favorite tool of voting experts that helps detect malfunctions. This makes the vote-by-mail system the most likely vote-from-home option.
The aftermath of the 2020 election raises questions about public trust in the outcome of vote-by-mail elections, even when there is little or no evidence of actual fraud. While these are legitimate concerns, it is expected that stronger integrity checks and better auditing procedures will make voting by mail as robust as in-person voting and will regain public trust. Voting by mail also improves on the status quo with respect to access to vote; data from locations with universal voting by mail, like Oregon, indicate that voters like voting by mail and it actually increases turnout (although in a modest way). Furthermore, it apparently does so in a nonpartisan way.
Voting by mail, however, does increase the risk that voters will cast ballots that do not represent their true beliefs. Voters have less autonomy at home than they do at the voting booth. This can result in intimidated voters, either by peers or family members, or can be exploited to buy votes.
All in all, we hope widespread voting by mail is here to stay. It may not be perfect, but expanding access while retaining public trust in the system is vital to democracy. Still, keeping traditional in-person voting around is important, as it is the best method to prevent voter coercion.
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Ran Canetti is a professor of Computer Science at Boston University and the director of the center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security. Gabe Kaptchuk is a research professor of Computer Science at Boston University.