Given that mail-in votes pose such a unique additional challenge, it is important that in the post- COVID era, states reexamine pandemic-era rules rather than simply keep them out of inertia.

There is no excuse for conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 presidential election was somehow wrongly decided due to massive fraud, and we will not offer any such excuses. But that doesn’t mean voter fraud doesn’t happen or that the 2020 election did not suffer from serious fraud and ballot integrity problems.

Importantly, it also does not mean that election integrity measures are not needed before the 2022 election.

A new report based on government data shows there are still big election integrity problems that must be resolved. To be specific, more than 15 million mail-in ballots were unaccounted for in the last election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation found that those ballots, making up one-sixth of those mailed to presumably valid voters, were either lost, undeliverable, or rejected upon return.

This, all by itself, is sufficient reason for the states to tighten up the vote-bymail process that dominated 2020 and other election integrity measures, such as voter ID.

For those still in denial about the problem of election integrity, there have been disturbing findings in recent years that call for investigations and further election integrity measures.

For example, a September 2020 report also by PILF, based again on government voter data, found that nearly 44,000 voters may have cast multiple ballots in 2016 using their duplicate registrations. Moreover, nearly 10,000 voters in Georgia and the same number in North Carolina — both tight races in the last presidential election — appear to have voted twice in 2018 based on available government voter data.

Did you know, at that time, there were about 350,000 dead people on the voter rolls of the 41 states for which data were available?

After two consecutive presidential elections whose outcome could have been changed by the flipping of fewer than 100,000 votes in a handful of states, those are crisis numbers.

Sure, most of the time, the dead do not vote. But their names should still be removed from the voter rolls. The basic reason for this is that properly maintained voter rolls help reinforce voters’ faith in the system. But there is another reason, too — in some states, based on government data, the report found that a whole lot of voters do not.

In North Carolina, a crucial competitive state in the last several elections, nearly 2,500 voters were credited with voting while dead in 2016, as well as nearly 2,200 in 2018. In both cases, that’s before COVID-19 and the rise in voting by mail. Significantly, the number of zombie voters in North Carolina was three times the second-worst state both years — Kentucky (710) in 2016 and Mississippi in 2018 (723).

No, those are not huge numbers. But in a close race, especially at the state level, that could change an outcome. (In the case of Kentucky, it means that more than half of the dead people on the rolls are actually voting in each election, which is both alarming and probably news to those late voters.) G.K. Chesterton famously wrote that tradition is the democracy of the dead, but this is not what he was referring to.

Aside from the rare absentee voter who coincidentally dies after mailing a ballot, the dead should never vote. Either something very wrong is happening in a few of these states, or government officials are making far too many mistakes in tracking who voted. Either way, there must be a closer investigation.

Election integrity is a real issue. Considering how much of the nation’s future hinges on the biennial elections held in every state, it is one of the most significant issues.

Setting aside all the smear campaigns by the media and Democrats that this issue doesn’t exist — or that concerns about voter fraud and election integrity are ipso facto racist — state legislatures must continue to reassure the public by making sure every vote is valid and counted exactly once.

Given that mail-in votes pose such a unique additional challenge, it is important that in the post- COVID era, states reexamine pandemic-era rules rather than simply keep them out of inertia.

Georgia and Texas had the right idea. Both states made it easier for eligible voters to cast ballots, but they also curtailed some of the special COVID-era provisions. Others should follow suit.