Can Voting by Mail Ensure a Safe and Secure Election?

During a presidential election year, the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to disrupt the most important tenet of democracy: political representation. In response, many states are implementing or considering systems to allow citizens to vote by mail.

Although most observers find large-scale voter fraud unlikely, there are significant challenges to scaling up vote-by-mail. Officials need to address cybersecurity concerns and make absentee voting more widely accessible. Otherwise the system will be set up for failure—and this election will be remembered as the 2020 vote-by-mail fiasco.

Join Maria Carnovale, lead policy analyst at Duke University’s Initiative for Science and Society, to discuss her Issues article, “Will the Idea of Vote-by-Mail Survive COVID-19?”