Five U.S. states have scrapped traditional polling places and replaced them with universal mail-in ballots. Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii automatically mail a ballot to every registered voter, so Election Day no longer means showing up at your neighborhood precinct. Instead, limited county-level service centers handle emergencies, ballot replacement, or accessibility needs — but these are not traditional polling places. The system is built entirely around mail-in voting.
The justification offered is that mailing every voter a ballot increases accessibility and convenience, especially for the elderly, the disabled, or people who live far from town centers. Election officials in Washington have even called the idea of returning to precinct polling “archaic.” But accessibility has always been addressed through absentee ballots. Eliminating in-person precincts does not solve problems — it creates new ones by stripping away oversight and replacing it with a system built on trust.
And here’s the real problem: ballots often don’t even go to eligible voters. Outdated rolls mean thousands of ballots get mailed to people who have moved, to the wrong addresses, and even to the deceased. Election officials admit this happens. In Oregon, a 2024 audit revealed that 1,561 noncitizens were wrongly added to the voter rolls. Washington state elections have repeatedly faced reports of ballots being sent to outdated addresses, including cases in 2020 where voters received multiple ballots after moving counties. In Colorado, clerks have acknowledged that ballots are regularly mailed to inactive voters because of bloated rolls. Hawaii’s first all-mail election in 2020 was plagued with problems — thousands of ballots arrived late or went missing on Oahu, forcing officials to admit “significant mailing delays” and voter confusion. Utah has also had issues, with voters reporting duplicate ballots being sent to the same households in 2020, which state officials blamed on inaccuracies in the voter rolls.
In each of these states, nearly all voting is done by mail or drop box, with very little in-person voting. That leaves the entire process especially vulnerable if the chain of custody is broken. Unlike at a polling place, where votes are cast in public view with bipartisan observers present, mail-in ballots are filled out at home and pass through multiple hands before they are counted. This opens the door to manipulation, coercion, or even vote-buying schemes. Experts have long noted that absentee ballots are uniquely vulnerable to fraud because they are cast outside of secure election settings.
Universal mail-in ballots aren’t about making voting easier — they’re about making oversight weaker. Eliminating neighborhood polling places and replacing them with ballots floating through the mail strips away the safeguards that keep elections credible. A secure system should be simple: voter ID, one person, one vote, on one Election Day. Anything else is an invitation for fraud.