Reservations are not like the rest of America. Mail service is spotty to non-existent. Many residents must drive miles to a post office to collect and send their mail. A county seat or a polling place may be even further. It is not uncommon for Native American voters to drive 50 to 75 miles — often on dirt roads that are impassible in inclement weather — to cast a ballot.
That is why ballot collection can be so crucial for ensuring Native American participation in the political process, and yet many states, including Utah, are banning the practice under the mistaken notion that it enables voting fraud.
Our research has unearthed no proven cases of fraud associating with ballot collection anywhere. Not one. Meanwhile, we documented numerous benefits in the form of lowering the barriers for tribal members to vote.
These benefits are not exclusive to Native Americans, but extend to all citizens in rural and low-income communities, especially the elderly, students and others lacking access to transportation.
In some parts of Western reservations, only one in 10 families has access to a vehicle. Many homes do not have street addresses, making mail delivery nearly impossible. Native Americans have the highest poverty rates in the nation, limiting their ability to access transportation, the internet and distant polling sites.
Tribes and their allies have responded to this problem by sending out ballot collectors to assist people in returning their sealed mail-in ballots. This service is voluntary; no one is forced to give a ballot collector a ballot — any kind of coercion is against the law. For example, the Native American group Western Native Voice has been successfully collecting ballots on Montana reservations for years. Montana has some of the largest reservations in the country, so ballot collection is a crucial service.
Tribes in Utah, Arizona and Nevada have also traditionally relied on ballot collection to assist their voters.
But in recent years, unfounded allegations that ballot collection leads to voter fraud have surfaced. As a result, Arizona and Utah have worked to ban ballot collection, even though research shows there had never been a voter fraud conviction in those states associated with ballot collection. In Montana, the state legislature passed two laws designed to cripple ballot collection, which violated the state’s constitution.
Claims about voter fraud generate an important question: Do the benefits of ballot collection outweigh the risk of voter fraud? Our study was designed to answer that question, using both qualitative and quantitative analyses. First, we assessed the benefits of ballot collection as a service to voters on reservations. Those benefits are widespread, given the conditions outlined above.
We then investigated whether ballot collection is linked to voter fraud. There is no separate database for voter fraud on reservations, so we examined national-level data. We compared rates of voter fraud in states that allow third-party ballot collection to states that strictly ban it. We used data on voter fraud crime from two sources: the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that maintains a data set on “actual convictions” for voter fraud, and a more limited data set collected by the Cronkite School of Journalism’s News21 Project. The Heritage Foundation data set covers all elections back to the early 1980s. The News21 Project includes data on “possible voter fraud” from 2000 to 2012. We analyzed the 2020 elections separately using the Heritage Foundation data.
Our results are quite compelling. The number of voter fraud cases of any kind are astonishingly rare — about 0.00006 percent of total votes cast. The minuscule number of voter fraud convictions were slightly higher in states that prohibit ballot collection. The number of voter fraud convictions for the 2020 election was so small that it was difficult to perform a statistical analysis.
We found no evidence that ballot collection has led to the delivery of a single fraudulent vote in the last two election cycles. Our findings generally support those of Ken Block, the analyst hired by the Trump Administration to “find voter fraud.” He concluded that “voter fraud has not swung any election outcome.”
The only real fraud is the lie that ballot collection leads to voter fraud. Ballot collection does not lead to voter fraud, but it does provide essential benefits to Native American voters, rural low-income voters, the elderly and students lacking transportation.
(Daniel McCool) Daniel McCool is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Utah.
Daniel McCool is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Utah.
(Weston McCool) Weston McCool is a postdoctoral researcher in the university’s Department of Anthropology.
Weston McCool is a postdoctoral researcher in the university’s Department of Anthropology.
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