Dr. Anne Mulhern

Imagine you go to the polls on election day and something unusual happens: you tell the poll worker your name and address and the poll worker says you can’t vote because you already have.

Well, if you did already vote, for example by mail, that’s somewhat reassuring, actually. Quite probably that means that your mail-in ballot arrived at City Hall and that the elections office processed the envelope, checking you off as having voted (so that you couldn’t vote more than once). You can leave the polling place, reasonably secure that your previously filled out ballot has, at least, reached the elections office.

But what if you know you didn’t vote, not in early voting and not by mail-in voting either? What should you do?

Well, ideally, you would vote at the polling place, and the ballot that was cast in your name, either by error or by fraud, should be removed and the ballot that you are going to fill out should be counted in its place. Unfortunately, such a procedure is quite impossible. Because ballots must be kept secret, the other ballot that was cast in your name is irrevocably cast, it can not not be removed from the count, because it can not even be identified.

Instead, you will be asked to cast a provisional ballot. After the polls have closed but within a few days this ballot will be resolved and your vote may or may not be added to the final official count, depending on the outcome of the resolution.

So, how could “your” ballot have been cast in error?

First, mistakes used to happen occasionally, and still can in rare instances, but technology has greatly reduced the potential of it happening.

The use of poll pads has diminished the possibility a poll worker accidentally crossed off your name instead of some other person’s. The instances of someone else’s mail in ballot being accidentally attributed to you has been eliminated by the use of scanners, which match the bar code on the envelope with your name on the ballot.

Could technology fail and a scanning error take place? That possibility does exist, but at a far lower level than human error.

How could “your” ballot have been cast fraudulently? Well, again the options are mail-in and at the polling place.

To cast a ballot in your name at the polling place requires a certain brazenness and confidence that the poll workers don’t know you personally. Recall that a voter is not required to show ID unless challenged, and challenges are rare. Probably the early voting facilities at City Hall are the best place to perpetrate this kind of fraud as the poll workers there are the least likely to have a personal acquaintance with would-be voters.

The other way is by mail-in voting. Anyone can request a ballot for you, so long as they know your name, birthdate, and address, and they can have that ballot sent absolutely anywhere so they do not have to keep a sharp watch on your mailbox to extract the ballot when it arrives.

Whether “your” vote was cast fraudulently or in error, though, that vote has already been counted, it cannot be uncounted.

How can you avoid this surprising and unpleasant situation of finding that someone else has voted in your place? Well, one thing you could choose to do is to be proactive and monitor your mail-in ballot status at https://www.sec.state.ma.us/WhereDoIVoteMA/TrackMyBallot/ .

If you see that a ballot has been requested in your name, but you did not request it, then you will have accomplished something rather interesting: you will have detected a fraud in progress and not yet accomplished.

Just like you would notify your credit card company immediately if you saw a surprising charge on your credit card, you would, if you had any sense, immediately contact your local elections office.

Alternatively, you could request a mail-in ballot even if you do not intend to vote by mail.

The ballot can not be requested twice; so long as you receive the ballot, and keep it in your possession, no one else can use it. You can choose to use it or you can vote at the polling place; I have reasons to prefer voting at the polling place.

Even if you’re one of the “I don’t vote, it only encourages them” crowd, you should consider going through the steps I’ve explained above required to secure your vote; otherwise someone else may vote in your place and that’ll really encourage “them”.

But let’s suppose you didn’t take preventive measures or they were not adequate to prevent the surprising situation and you have had to fill out a provisional ballot.

Well, there’s not much left to do but to raise a ruckus. Make sure your predicament gets into the news. Make sure that other people in the same situation hear about it. That’s the only thing you can do to draw attention to the possibility that the election was so fraudulently conducted that fraud changed the outcome of the election.

If any fraud is detected in an election a choice has to be made: are the results of the election to be accepted or will the election have to be re-run because fraud might have changed the outcome of the election.

To decide this question, the elections office needs to know how much fraud actually occurred, but alas, that is unknowable except in a perfect situation that includes, among other things, 100% voter turnout.

Most election fraud probably does go undetected. In principle every election should be reported not just with the results but with the confidence, based on a publicly available statistical analysis and clearly stated assumptions, that the results are the same as they would have been without fraud. This never happens. Instead, when fraud is discovered, a flurry of forensic activity with no definite end goal ensues as described in this article: https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/video-allegedly-shows-woman-stealing-ballots-from-lawrence-mailbox/3190864/ .

So what can you do, as a private citizen, to help ensure that the upcoming elections are not fraudulent?

1)Vote at your polling place on election day.
2)Track your ballot whether or not you request one.
3)Get all your friends and neighbors and co-workers to do the same thing as the higher the turnout the better the chances of detecting fraud.
4)Report signs of possible election fraud, like a whole lot of mail-in ballots arriving in the mail at some surprising location to your local elections board.
5)Designate yourself a poll watcher and watch the polls.
6)Become a poll worker.