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Mail-in ballots go missing
Vote-in-person advocacy groups often claim that mail-in voting ballots are likely to go missing. They give a figure of 28 million mail-in ballots missing in the last four elections.
The argument
Vote-in-person advocacy groups often claim that mail-in voting ballots are likely to go missing. They cite data from the Federal Election Assistance Commission that between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots have remained unaccounted for. The President of the United States supported and championed the missing ballot narrative. He believes that the 2020 election is going to be disastrous because mail-in ballots will be lost and found in discarded piles. A substantial number of ballots never make it into the hands of election officials. Often there are never clear reasons why these ballots never reached the proper destination. Because state and local authorities cannot provide concrete explanations for what became of these ballots, the logical explanation is that they got misplaced in the convoluted system that is voting by mail. The millions of unaccounted for mail-in ballots justify the argument that mail-in ballots should be banned for the 2020 U.S. Elections.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The number of mail-in ballots cited as "missing" by vote-in-person advocacy groups is false and very misleading. These groups use the word “missing” to describe ballots that were mailed out to voters but not cast by these voters. Uncast ballots do not equate to missing ballots. If we equated uncast ballots to missing ballots, then over 250 million votes not cast by in-person Election Day voters from 2012 to 2018 are also “missing.” This classification is not true. The argument that millions of mail-in ballots go missing relies on misconstrued language and data. Vote-in-person advocacy groups rely on a wide definition of “missing” to promote the claim that mail-in ballots go missing. Rather, the mail-in voting system works in the United States and has worked for decades.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The figure does not mean what the premise takes it to mean. The commission's data records ballots sent to voters and not returned, which mostly counts people who chose not to use them or voted another way; calling these unaccounted for turns non-participation into loss. Endorsement by a public figure adds nothing to the evidence. [Rejecting P2] Declaring one "logical explanation" excludes the obvious ones without argument, and the counter applies the same test to show where it leads: on this definition every vote not cast in person would also be missing. Even if ballots did go astray, the remedy would be tracking and cure procedures rather than banning the method — a step the premise never justifies.