Democrats in Florida and Michigan Recognize Security Issues in Mail-in Voting

From John Fund at the WSJ's Political Diary:

Democrats are inching towards a solution on how to handle the Florida and Michigan convention delegations, now barred from voting for president at the party's Denver convention because their state parties broke Democratic National Committee rules and held early primaries.

The solution would involve using privately-funded mail-in elections that would eliminate the expense of having thousands of precincts manned. Also avoided would be caucuses, which make it difficult for night shift workers and the handicapped to participate. But some knowledgeable Democrats are raising caution flags because of the experiences their states have had with mail-in ballot fraud.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan told ABC News that there is a "security issue" with a mail-in ballot. "How do you make sure that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more ballots can be properly counted and that duplicate ballots can be avoided?" Mr. Levin has vivid memories of how absentee ballots have routinely been abused in Detroit and other cities by unscrupulous candidates.

In Florida, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Miami has her own issues with a mail-in ballot. "It's fraught with problems and now is not the time to be experimenting when we're talking about stakes this high," she says. "We still have very raw nerves from the 2000 recount."

For a party that tends to pooh-pooh concerns about voter fraud, it's refreshing to see a few key Democrats alert to the problems of having ballots distributed and handled outside the supervision of election officials. Such concerns are always at their highest in elections with big stakes that could be determined by a few votes. Would that Democrats would now extend that concern to general elections where the dangers are just as great, if not greater.