Evidence Mounts That Mail-In Voting Will Bring Only Fraud And Chaos
For months we’ve heard reassurances from Democrats that the nation can, and should, vote by mail this November. It won’t, we’ve been told, result in an increase in voter fraud, and we can count on the Postal Service to handle the workload. And, of course, voting by mail is vital to prevent more coronavirus deaths.
It’s becoming painfully obvious that none of that is true, and that the Democrats’ only real motivation is to swing key elections in their favor.
Nearly every news story about mail-in voting asserts that there’s no evidence that it will increase fraud. Really?
The Heritage Foundation recently released a paper that detailed four elections that were overturned because of fraud involving absentee and mail-in ballots, including a school board election in California, a Miami mayoral election, a primary election in Indiana, and a congressional election in North Carolina.
In North Carolina, the state board of elections found “concerted fraudulent activities related to absentee by-mail ballots” and ruled that the election “was corrupted by fraud, improprieties and irregularities so pervasive that its results are tainted as the fruit of an operation manifestly unfair to the voters and corrosive to our system of representative government. “
Among other things, the investigation found forged signatures, falsified witness certifications, pressure on voters to fill out ballots a certain way, and “fraudulently voted blank or incomplete” ballots.
The election board ordered a new vote.
There’s an investigation underway right now in Paterson, New Jersey, in which residents have been charged with criminal election fraud in an all-mail municipal election.
“Evidence is surfacing of everything from voters reporting that they never received their absentee ballots (even though they are recorded as having voted) to accusations that one of the campaigns may have submitted fraudulent ballots,” writes Hans von Spakovsky, Heritage’s election integrity expert.
In July, former Pennsylvania Democratic congressman Michael “Ozzie” Myers was charged with ballot stuffing, bribery, and obstruction of justice in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 Democratic primaries. And a West Virginia mail carrier pleaded guilty earlier to attempted election fraud by altering ballot request forms.
A Portland State University survey in one Oregon county found that 5% of voters admitted that other people marked their ballots and 2.4% said someone else signed for them.
Von Spakovsky notes that “if that percentage held for the rest of the state, it would mean tens of thousands of illegal ballots.”
When confronted with evidence of fraud, Democrats and their handmaidens in the press dismiss it as not “widespread.”
But fraud doesn’t have to be widespread to alter results. President Donald Trump won the 2016 election by flipping three states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — with a total vote margin of just 77,744. That’s small enough to tempt the Trump “resistance” into cheating “for the good of the country” without committing “widespread” voter fraud.
Aside from fraud, there’s the reality that a rush to a mail-in election this November will almost certainly be an administrative disaster that could delay results for weeks.
Just look at New York City, which is still trying to figure out who won primary elections in early June because of a multitude of problems, including the lack of postmarks and ballots that didn’t get to voters until it was too late to mail them.
To add to the confusion, on Tuesday a federal judge ordered the city to count those ballots that had been invalidated for lack of a postmark.
And in Michigan, “mail problems marred the delivery of absentee ballots” in “the run-up to Tuesday’s primary in the state,” which was “ramping up fears of political pressure on the U.S. Postal Service just three months before Nov. 3.”
A report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that in the past four presidential elections, Oregon had 177,000 ballots listed as undeliverable, almost 29,000 were rejected and the fate of 871,737 was “unknown.”
And as we noted in this space earlier, a USPS inspector general investigation of the April 7 Wisconsin primary found that more than 3,500 absentee ballots never made it to voters, and hundreds had no postmarks.
Over the past four presidential elections, the post office sent 2 million absentee ballots to the wrong addresses.
Now imagine all this going on nationwide. The confusion, lawsuits, and acrimony will make the Florida recount look quaint. There’s already speculation that election results from mail-in voting might not be known until next year.
And for what? For public health reasons? There’s no scientific basis for such fears. And besides, if people can protest in the streets, gather for a prominent politician’s funeral or shop every week at the grocery store without causing undue harm to public health, surely they can stand in line (six feet apart and wearing masks) to vote in person.
Unless anyone doubts that Democrats motivation in pushing mail-in voting schemes is to improve their chance of victory, consider that they tried to sneak a nationwide all-mail voting mandate into a coronavirus relief bill back in the early spring, when they had no idea what the scale of the pandemic would be
Failing to get it done legislatively, leftist groups have been filing lawsuits in states across the country, not only to force them to send mail-in ballots to every name on (often outdated and error-riddled) voter registration lists, but to ban even the most basic protections against voter fraud.
Democrats don’t just want to let everyone vote by mail, they want to abolish witness and signature requirements. They want voters to have the chance to fix their own signatures if there’s a problem. They want to allow vote harvesting, whereby paid activists can collect ballots en masse and deliver them to the post office.
On ABC’s “This Week,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said about mail-in voting that: ” I don’t think it benefits one party or another. But I think it is essential from a health reason because we want to keep people at home to vote without having them all collect on Election Day.”
Only a Democrat can get away with making such ludicrous claims on national TV.
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