The Military Has Voted by Mail Since the Civil War

NBC News: “It was the 1860s, the Civil War was raging and Republicans, led by President Abraham Lincoln, wanted to let Union soldiers vote from the battlefield. The opposition Democrats balked. They warned of rampant fraud and ‘a scheme’ by Republicans ‘to gain some great advantage to their party,’ as one Wisconsin state senator put it before the legislature voted on party lines to become the first state to legalize absentee voting.”

“About 150,000 of the 1 million Union soldiers were able to vote absentee in the 1864 presidential election in what became the first widespread use of non-in person voting in American history.”

“A century and a half later, amidst a new debate over vote-by-mail as the country prepares to hold an election during a different kind of war — this one against the coronavirus, America’s long history of letting soldiers vote from far-flung war zones shows the issue has always been controversial, but that the worst fears of critics have never come to pass.”