Fact check: All mailed ballots — called 'absentee' and not — require voter verification

Fact check: All mailed ballots — called ‘absentee’ and not — require voter verification

Claim: Absentee ballots and mail-in ballots are not the same; absentee requires proof of identity, mail-in doesn’t.

As COVID-19 cases continue to spread across the country, many voters are preparing to cast ballots by mail in the general election. But misinformation about voting, both online and straight from the mouths of politicians, is making some Americans second guess the process.

“Do you know the difference between mail-in ballot vs. absentee ballot? Absentee ballot REQUIRES you to prove who you are! Mail-in DOES NOT!” a post on Facebook reads.

The claim echoes those made by President Donald Trump, who has alleged that absentee voting and mail-in voting are different — and that one is more vulnerable to fraud than the other.

The person who wrote the Facebook post did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment.

Verifying votes

To prevent fraud, all votes have to be verified to be counted. States have different ways to do that for in-person voting, but by mail, the principal method used to detect and prevent fraud is by verifying information on the mail ballot itself, according to the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.

To vote by mail, voters must include personal identifying information, such as an address, birthday, driver’s license number or last four digits of a Social Security number. A voter’s remaining personal information is matched against the information stored on voter rolls, such as a signature.

States verify mailed ballots in different ways. For example, Alabama requires a copy of the voter’s ID to be included and either two witnesses older than 18 or a notary public must sign the envelope in addition to the voter. In Maine, a signature by the voter on the envelope is compared to the signature on the absentee ballot application. Likewise, Colorado uses bipartisan teams who compare the signature on every ballot to ones the state has on file for every registered voter.

Difference between ‘absentee’ and ‘mail-in’ ballots

After a couple of test runs in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, the first major use of absentee voting in the U.S. took place during the Civil War, when soldiers deployed across the country wanted to vote where they had permanent residences while they were “absent,” according to the Constitutional Accountability Center. The CAC is a nonprofit think tank whose mission is “to promote the progressive promise of the whole Constitution’s text and history,” its website says.

Wisconsin led the way with absentee voting legislation ahead of the 1862 election, with a law that stated “all qualified (white) electors … in the actual military service … (are) entitled to exercise the right of suffrage at any general election … at the several posts, camps or places where the regiment or battery of artillery may be.”

That allowed Army officers to vote in their camps and forward their ballots to their home-state governors and secretaries of state. More states followed, but some Democratic-led states declined to pass absentee voting legislation in an attempt to suppress those votes out of fear that soldiers would primarily vote Republican, which was President Abraham Lincoln’s party.

More:Fact check: Online post questioning voting by mail is missing context

After the Civil War ended, states moved to make absentee voting more accessible to everyone, not just soldiers. By 1924, 45 of the 48 states had adopted absentee voting to some extent, and today, absentee voting is allowed in all 50 states — though some states require an excuse to vote that way.

As voting absentee expanded, the terminology evolved. According to the National Conference of State Legislators, states have chosen to use different terms to describe absentee voting, including “advance ballots,” “mailed ballots,” “by-mail ballots,” “mail ballots” or “vote-by-mail ballots.”

“This issue highlights the fact that we have a diversity of approaches to election administration in the United States,” Michael Thorning, associate director of governance at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told the Washington Post. “Some people have called it voting at home, some people have referred to it as voting outside of the polling place. But at the end of the day, these are systems for delivering ballots to voters.”

Despite differing terminology, it all refers to the same thing: using mail to deliver ballots and sending those filled-out ballots back via mail as well.

Generally speaking, the term “absentee ballot” typically refers to ballots that are requested and then mailed, while “mail-in ballot” — though often used interchangeably with “absentee” in a way that’s also correct — might refer to universal mail-in policies in some states.

Distinction between universal mail-in voting and absentee policies amplified by politics

The term “universal mail-in voting” refers to a mail balloting system in which ballots are automatically mailed to all registered voters. Only nine states and the District of Columbia plan to hold universal mail-in elections this year, USA TODAY reported.

“It’s a tiny number of states that do this,” Lawrence Norden, director of the Election Reform Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York School of Law, told USA TODAY. “And they’re not the states that are probably going to determine the outcome of the presidential election.

“In the vast majority of states, voters are given the option to vote by mail, and we should expect that if the primaries were any indication, that many, many people are going to choose that option.”

Trump has attempted to make a distinction between absentee ballots and the ones received in states that use in universal mail-in policies.

“Absentee ballots, by the way, are fine,” Trump told reporters Aug. 13. “But the universal mail-ins that are just sent all over the place, where people can grab them and grab stacks of them, and sign them and do whatever you want, that’s the thing we’re against.”

But the only difference between the absentee and universal mail-in voting is that in states that use universal mail-in voting, registered voters don’t have to ask to have ballots sent to them. Regardless of the system, a person must be registered to vote to receive the ballot. And for any mailed-in vote to be counted, the voter’s information must be verified by state elections officials.

Our rating: False

We rate the claim that “absentee” and “mail-in” ballots are different, because absentee requires proof of identity and mail-in does not, as FALSE because it was not supported by our research. Absentee and mail-in ballots are both processes for voting by mail. The only difference between them is that states with universal mail-in systems do not require registered voters to request ballots – they just send them. All mailed ballots must be verified to be counted.