Rarely has a political party placed so much emphasis on eliminating safeguards to ballot security as the Democrats have in 2020.
Democrat-controlled Nevada is the latest, passing a 100-page bill in a “special session” that allows, along with mail-in ballots, “ballot harvesting,” which allows partisan ballot collectors to gather ballots and send them on to election officials.
Not to be outdone, Virginia, also Democrat-dominated, now allows mail-in ballots to be submitted without a witness signature.
Election Defense notes that “Many popular vote-by-mail and absentee systems are ripe for fraud and abuse…Vote by mail presents a serious and so-far unsolved problem: a broken chain of custody of the ballots. That means the ballots are moved without consistent public oversight, offering opportunities for fraud and mismanagement.”
According to the 2012 Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project report: Having tens of millions of ballots being transmitted and marked without strict chain-of-custody procedures creates risks that simply do not exist with any form of in-person voting, whether on Election Day or in early-voting settings. According to a study by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the 2008 presidential election voting by mail had an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent:
“35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted. 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them. Another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials. Election officials rejected 800,000 ballots…A 2005 report the Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded, “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” To be clear, studies have proven that few actual voters are engaged in any kind of fraud at a level that could change the outcome of an election. Instead, election insiders continue to constitute the greater threat. The Heritage Foundation … uncovered more crimes by elections insiders utilizing absentee ballots to attempt to rig elections.”
The issue of partisan handling of mail-in ballots is made more serious by the fact that the American Postal Workers Union has endorsed one of the candidates, Joe Biden.
New York, after California the largest Democrat-dominated state, is considering a proposed law that would require “drop boxes” for voters to place their ballots in. Embarrassingly for mail ballot advocates, a Congressional race using mail-in ballots in New York City proved so disastrous that the drop box idea seeks to add yet another unsecured, unsafe balloting procedure to an already unsafe process.
Similarly, in Democrat-run New Jersey, an election for a Paterson City Council seat employing mail-in ballots went so awry that State Superior Court Judge Ernest Caposela ruled that it had been irreversibly tainted due to extreme mail-in voter fraud.
Note the progression: First, Democrats demand mail-in ballots. After achieving that, the Party demands the elimination of basic security measures such as requiring authentication of the person sending in the ballot, and reasonable “chain of custody” measures to ensure that the ballot has not been tampered with.
Not all current attempts to weaken precautions are new. Previously, California allowed automatic voting registration of anyone dealing with its Department of Motor Vehicles. The Wall Street Journal reported that the state DMV acknowledges that this has led to incorrectly registered 23,000 voters. Since California allows illegals to get drivers licenses, that has presented a major threat to ballot integrity. The LA Times reported that over one million illegals have been granted drivers licenses.
The use of the controversial concept of “ballot harvesting” has led to major gains for California Democrats. The Independent Voters Network (IVN) describes what happened: “Ballot harvesting was used for the first time in November, and has clearly been advantageous to Democrats… The “minor” change was implemented when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law [several] years ago. Here’s what it changed: In the past, California allowed only relatives or those living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. Ballot harvesting allows anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — ‘harvesting’ them. In Orange County alone, every House seat went Democratic. The chairman of the county Republican Party, Fred Whitaker, said: ‘…the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000, this is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.’”
Breitbart notes: “Democrats have railed against voter ID laws…but [in the 2016] Democratic National Convention officials only issued credentials to those who present state-issued IDs…But even as Democrats require[d] IDs to enter their convention, The Voter Integrity Project discovered there were 30,000 dead North Carolinians still on the state’s voter rolls, Democrats continue to fiercely oppose voter ID laws.”
Democrats continue to rabidly oppose updating voter registration rolls. It’s valid to ask why. A 2016 Pew Center on the States study found “millions of voter registration records nationwide that are either inaccurate or no longer valid…based on data [indicating] a voter died, moved, or had been inactive from 2004 to March 2011.” The study revealed that 2,758,578 individuals were registered to vote in more than one state. In addition, “12.7 million records nationwide…appear to be out of date and no longer reflect the voter’s current information, more than 1.8 million records for people who are no longer living, but have active registrations on voter rolls, and 12 million records with incorrect addresses…once duplicates among categories are eliminated, approximately 24 million registration records, or nearly 13% of the national total, are estimated to be inaccurate or no longer valid.”
Illustration: Pixabay