In sharp contrast to the above,
The New York Times was singing a much different tune in 2012 (bold emphasis added):
Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/...il-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
Adam Liptak (06 October 2012)
[...]
Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond. If the contests next month are close enough to be within what election lawyers call the margin of litigation, the grounds on which they will be fought will not be hanging chads but ballots cast away from the voting booth.
[...]
The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.
[...]
Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say
there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner. The list includes the 2000 presidential election, in which problems with absentee ballots in Florida were a little-noticed footnote to other issues.
[...]
There is a bipartisan consensus that voting by mail, whatever its impact, is more easily abused than other forms. In a 2005 report signed by President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, who served as secretary of state under the first President George Bush, the Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded,
“Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
On the most basic level, absentee voting replaces the oversight that exists at polling places with something akin to an honor system.
“Absentee voting is to voting in person,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has written, “as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”
[...]
Fraud Easier Via Mail
Election administrators have a shorthand name for a central weakness of voting by mail. They call it granny farming.
“The problem,” said Murray A. Greenberg, a former county attorney in Miami, “is really with the collection of absentee ballots at the senior citizen centers.” In Florida, people affiliated with political campaigns “help people vote absentee,” he said. “And help is in quotation marks.”
Voters in nursing homes can be subjected to subtle pressure, outright intimidation or fraud. The secrecy of their voting is easily compromised. And their ballots can be intercepted both coming and going.
The problem is not limited to the elderly, of course. Absentee ballots also make it much easier to buy and sell votes. In recent years, courts have invalidated mayoral elections in Illinois and Indiana because of fraudulent absentee ballots.
Voting by mail also played a crucial role in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, when the margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore was razor thin and hundreds of absentee ballots were counted in apparent violation of state law. The flawed ballots, from Americans living abroad, included some without postmarks, some postmarked after the election, some without witness signatures, some mailed from within the United States and some sent by people who voted twice.
All would have been disqualified had the state’s election laws been strictly enforced.
In the recent primary here, almost 40 percent of ballots were not cast in the voting booth on the day of the election. They were split between early votes cast at polling places, which Mr. Sancho, the Leon County elections supervisor, favors, and absentee ballots, which make him nervous.
“There has been not one case of fraud in early voting,” Mr. Sancho said. “The only cases of election fraud have been in absentee ballots.”
Efforts to prevent fraud at polling places have an ironic consequence, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told the Senate Judiciary Committee September last year. They will, he said, “drive more voters into the absentee system, where
fraud and coercion have been documented to be real and legitimate concerns.”
“That is,” he said, “a law ostensibly designed to reduce the incidence of fraud is likely to increase the rate at which voters utilize a system
known to succumb to fraud more frequently.”
[...]
Election law experts say that pulling off in-person voter fraud on a scale large enough to swing an election, with scores if not hundreds of people committing a felony in public by pretending to be someone else, is hard to imagine, to say nothing of exceptionally risky.
There are much simpler and more effective alternatives to commit fraud on such a scale, said Heather Gerken, a law professor at Yale.
“You could steal some absentee ballots or stuff a ballot box or bribe an election administrator or fiddle with an electronic voting machine,” she said. That explains, she said, “why all the evidence of stolen elections involves absentee ballots and the like.”