In January, California police announced the results of a months-long investigation into the alarming discovery in 2021 of a man passed out in his car with drugs, a gun, and 300 mail ballots. Police concluded that Eduardo Mena was trying to steal people’s identities, not their ballots.
That was the good news. The bad news is that the Mena incident showed it was trivially easy to steal hundreds of ballots weeks before an election. If Mena hadn’t passed out in a convenience store parking lot, he may have gotten away with it, too. That’s hardly a testament to the security of mail-in voting.
The Mena story is just a taste of the many, deeper issues with mail-in voting — concerns that seldom get the attention they deserve, even as Congress debates measures like HR1 to supercharge mail voting nationwide.
The fact is, widespread mail voting can inject doubt and uncertainty into elections. In its final report, the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform — co-chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James Baker III — pegged mail voting as “one of the major sources of fraud.”
