We Should Worry More About Absentee Voting Fraud

After the recent midterms, allegations of election fraud involving absentee ballots surfaced in several races. Some of these, including the Georgia governor’s contest, alleged that valid absentee votes for the “wrong” candidate were improperly discarded or disqualified. That is bad enough, but I am concerned here with the opposite kind of fraud — the kind in which fraudulent absentee ballots are submitted and counted as valid.

Absentee ballot fraud of that kind is now at the center of a disputed election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional district. In that race, the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement is refusing to certify Republican Mark Harris’s 905-vote victory over Democrat Dan McCready. Numerous voters have testified that unknown people visited their homes to collect their absentee ballots. These unknown people then allegedly either completed the ballots themselves and submitted them, or, if they were already completed, discarded them if they had reason to think they were not marked for Harris.

In an editorial about the incident, the Charlotte Observer expressed concern that such fraud may also have been committed during the Republican primary that Harris won earlier this year. The Observer maintained that absentee ballot fraud is much more of a problem than the in-person voting fraud targeted by…