BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — The 2020 election raised concerns around voter fraud and election security, so 23ABC looked into what experts had to say about the issue as people mail in their ballots or prepare to head to the polls Tuesday.
Associate Professor of Business Analytics and Technology Management at Towson University Natalie Scala said the term falls under a broader category of voting error. This can relate to two things, the first being those who intend to do harm or disrupt the election process, creating fraudulent representation.
The other way to look at voting error involves unintentional mistakes that are made when casting a ballot. That includes failing to sign the ballot, inconsistent signatures, not mailing the ballot out in time, problems with a voter's ID, or voters not filling out their ballots correctly.
Scala said voting error occurs much more than voter fraud.
“Actually voting fraud is not that common in the United States,” Scala said. “And back from 2000-2012, there were only 491 cases out of literally billions of votes cast. And in 2020 we saw just about three cases, for example, in Pennsylvania.”
Professor of Computer Science at Rice University Dan Wallach agreed that the rate of these types of crimes are low. Wallach said following the 2020 election, around 60 lawsuits were filed around the U.S. alleging voting fraud and all of them were dismissed.
While there are smaller instances of voter fraud, he said none of them were significant to change the outcome of an election.
“In particular there appears to be behavior called vote harvesting, which is where these harvesters collect together vote-by-mail, postal mail ballots and make sure that they’re marked correctly and violate these voters’ privacy, and those ballots can then be aggregately voted for a particular candidate,” said Wallach. “There have been a small number of convictions around this sort of behavior, and again, to the best of our knowledge, this does not appear to be something that is significant enough to have changed the outcomes of any major elections.”