What you need to know
Ballot harvesting involves collecting absentee ballots from voters and delivering them to a collection spot. Critics argue that unethical harvesters could change votes on ballots, substitute new ones for the ones they collect, or only deliver ballots supporting their preferred candidates. More subtly, ballot harvesting might also allow a supervisor, professor, or other individual of authority to pressure underlings to vote as that particular individual wishes by watching them fill out ballots and then collecting them.
We do not know how much ballot harvesting occurs. In some isolated cases, individuals have been convicted of collecting and tampering with absentee votes. However, research by Everything Policy finds that most states have voting procedures that reduce the incentives for widespread ballot harvesting.
For widespread ballot harvesting to work, four things must be true about a state’s election procedures:
- No-excuse absentee voting (otherwise, there will be few ballots to harvest)
- Non-relatives are allowed to collect and return absentee ballots
- Higher limits on the number of ballots that one individual can return
- Widespread use of drop boxes (less scrutiny of people returning ballots)
As shown below, only 13 states satisfy all four requirements above. They range from California to Wyoming, mostly strong Democrat-controlled states, with two Republican-controlled states (Montana and Wyoming) and one swing state (Nevada.) Five of the 13 (California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) use statewide vote-by-mail.
This finding does not mean that substantial ballot harvesting occurs in any of these 13 states; it is just that their election procedures make this activity legal and may potentially favor one political party over another. The remaining states are less likely to have substantial ballot harvesting because this behavior is explicitly illegal or a low-benefit-high-cost activity.
The Take-Away
Ballot harvesting, or the distribution and collection of absentee ballots, is regulated by state law.
The potential for fraudulent ballot harvesting varies across states.
Only 13 states have electoral rules that make fraudulent ballot harvesting worthwhile.
Further reading
Olson, W. (2022) The Trouble with Ballot Harvesting. https://tinyurl.com/3typzrws, accessed 11/4/24
Sources
Olson, W. (2022) The Trouble with Ballot Harvesting. https://tinyurl.com/3typzrws, accessed 11/4/24
National Conference of State Legislatures. (2024). Voting Beyond the Polling Place. https://tinyurl.com/4z4n8skr, accessed 11/4/24
Contributors
Ralph Fernando (Intern) is an Economics and Mathematics student at Indiana University Bloomington. He will graduate in May 2025 and plans to attend graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. in Economics.
Dr. Carolyn Holmes (Content Lead) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her PhD from Indiana University in 2015. Her research concerns nationalism and democratization, and has been funded by the Institute for International Education, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Political Science Association.
Dr. William Bianco (Research Director) received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Rochester. He is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Indiana Political Analytics Workshop at Indiana University. His current research is on representation, political identities, and the politics of scientific research.
