I & I Editorial BoardI&I Editorial
Democrats and their media scribes have spent more than three years glued to the narrative that President Donald Trump stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton by colluding with Russia to rig the outcome. But they don’t care about the legitimacy of elections. If they did, they wouldn’t be agitating for voting by mail this fall.
“House Democrats have sought to drastically overhaul the American electoral system in light of the pandemic, arguing dramatic change is needed to allow Americans to vote safely,” Politico reported last week.
It seems they have the public on their side. A recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found nearly 60% of voters “either strongly or somewhat support a federal law that would mandate that states ‘provide mail-in ballots to all voters for elections occurring during the coronavirus pandemic.’”
What they don’t have, though, is a good argument to defend their proposal for turning an entire election, or nearly all of one, into a contest of absentee ballots.
Few elections, even in the U.S., are ever perfectly clean. But the potential for a dirty election sharply increases when ballots are scattered in the wind.
“Absentee ballots are the tools of choice of election fraudsters because they are voted outside the supervision of election officials, making it easier to steal, forge, or alter them, as well as to intimidate voters,” says Hans A. von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation.
Going entirely to by-mail elections would unwisely endanger the security and integrity of the election process, particularly if officials automatically mail absentee ballots to all registered voters without a signed, authenticated request from each voter.
Voter registration rolls are notoriously inaccurate and out of date, containing the names of voters who are deceased, have moved, or otherwise have become ineligible.
Having thousands of ballots arriving in the mail for individuals who no longer reside at a registered address risks those ballots being stolen and voted.
Two decades ago, when the country was squirming through the recount of the 2000 presidential election, the Los Angeles Times conducted an examination that found “vote whores” in Texas who “do favors for people in return for their absentee ballots.” They preferred to be called “canvassers or consultants.” But their real work was buying ballots. Failing that, “they steal them from mailboxes.”
The Times also reported that:
“Indiana, which encourages voting with sign-ups by mail and at driver’s license bureaus, has jammed its registration lists with hundreds of thousands of people who should not be on them,” while “In Oregon, a preliminary survey indicates that more than 36,000 of the state’s 1.5 million voters may have mailed in ballots this year that were signed by someone else. Some students in Wisconsin say they voted as many as four times.”
“By most accounts,” said the Times, “the preferred way to cheat is with mail-in ballots,” which is exactly what von Spakovsky has said.
As we noted in early April, both the New York Times and the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform have agreed that voting by mail has a higher potential for fraud and abuse than other forms of voting.
Writing a few weeks ago for RealClearPolitics, Mark Hemingway pointed out that “a significant increase in mail-in voting this fall could greatly incentivize ‘ballot harvesting,’” in which third parties gather “mail-in ballots on behalf of voters and deliver them to election officials.”
“There’s long been a consensus,” Hemingway continued, “that such a practice incentivizes fraud, and ballot harvesting is illegal in most of the country.”
Apparently it’s a scam that works so well that it “played a key role in ousting several Republican congressmen in Orange County in 2018, a longstanding GOP stronghold” in Southern California that has been moving leftward.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking the Democrats are proposing a mail-in election out of a sense of obligation to health and safety. They are simply doing their best to take advantage of a crisis, and they are highly motivated to do whatever they are able to to remove Trump from the White House.
Remember, they’re from a party that’s deranged enough to pursue an evidence-free three-year collusion-investigation-impeachment charade, and clearly yearns to govern without constitutional limits. They would be happy to create conditions in which it would be easier to steal an election. It might be easier than using raw politics to nullify a legal one, which they have already tried to do.
Given what we know, voting in person this fall shouldn’t cause coronavirus cases to spike. Nearly a half-million Wisconsin voters went to the polls on April 7, and according to the Madison State Journal, “rates of new confirmed COVID-19 cases didn’t increase in Wisconsin compared with the rest of the country” in the weeks afterward.
That won’t stop the vote-by-mail crusade, though. The Democrats and the media are too invested in throwing Trump out of Washington to bother with facts.
— Written by J. Frank Bullitt
Bob Maistros
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
It should go without saying, that if Americans are forced to “stay at home” and vote via “mail-in” ballots this fall, democrats will absolutely win the White House and both chambers of Congress by wide margins, because the fraud will be massive in terms of ineligible votes and lost ballots. I say this with 100% certainty….
More importantly, Constitutional Republicans will never win a national or state election ever again and the United States as it has existed since 1776 will no longer exist…
The People will have to stop the current rush to “mail-in” elections for 2020 at any cost. No matter the loss of life due to COVID19, the U.S. economy MUST be reopened very soon and the people must STOP all effort to convert the nation to “remote voting” or there will be nothing left of this country worth saving by year end.
And yet they fight tooth and nail against voter ID, to me that just shows the Democrats have no desire to secure elections, any more than they want to secure our borders, I truly am beginning to think they hate American
IMHO, every last mail-in ballot should go to a special address at the local federal attorney for safe keeping and accounting, at the very least. Line up, with USPS and DOJ resources, all that’s needed for violations of mail fraud.
Presidential elections are managed by the states, not the Federal Government.
Art IV, Sect IV: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…
This can be interpreted as providing against election theft. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 can be interpreted, via J Black’s “penumbra” to cover protecting the votes of ALL citizens.
For interpretations, see https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-4/21-guarantee-of-republican-form-of-government.html
I live in a democratic leaning Oregon. Vote by mail allows ballots to arrive two weeks before the election, and be counted by partisan hacks that count the ballots. The parties then narrow their efforts (phone calls and advertising) to those who have not yet voted. Life happens during those twp weeks before the election. This destroys election day as I knew it growing up. Show up at the polling place to fill out the ballot. Some states do not take dead people off their rolls. Ballots can and do get stolen. Lots of funny business and loss of American tradition. States should be in control of elections not the federal govt.
States *are* in control of elections, my man.
Progressives and socialists have very nearly succeeded in their decades-long strategy of engineering the decline and fall of our democratic republic. Aided by well-meaning but terminally-naive social justice warriors since the 1960s, these leftists have utilized lifetime-tenured, hyper-politicized lawyers posing as impartial judges to impose their collectivist agenda upon our beloved nation. In addition, they have used unconstitutional, administrative agencies infested with swarms of unaccountable bureaucrats to lawlessly seize control of our homes, churches, schools, private businesses and other personal sanctuaries historically deemed off-limits to the federal government.
Voting by mail and ballot harvesting are just two more fraudulent tactics intended to advance their agenda by destroying the integrity of the electoral process. Without honest elections, they are well aware, America’s founding principle of limited, consensual government cannot exist. By these means, they hope to compete their best laid plans to fundamentally transform the U.S. Constitution from a security pact among the sovereign states and their citizens into an instrument of surrender to an unconstrained, coercive federal government.
Preventing this abomination will require the rise of a grassroots movement of non-violent, non-partisan, liberty-loving citizen CEOs (Constitution Enforcement Officers) with the courage to eliminate–metaphorically speaking–our lawless, wannabe ruling class in Washington, D.C. Those of us who oppose these outlaws must base our actions upon the principle that, by rendering null and void the SOLE source of their just powers (i.e. the Constitution of the United States of America), they have forfeited their legitimate authority over us.
Of one thing we can be certain. Government of the people, by the people, for the people will surely perish from the earth if we fail to force them back within their original, strict constitutional constraints. Only if we succeed will America survive for future generations as–in the words of Ronald Reagan–“a nation that has a government, not the other way around.”
now it makes sense why the dems want to bail out the post office
What could possibly go wrong having the Pony express delivering votes?
You would think that professional journalists citing a 20 year old LA Times article would at least be capable of linking to the correct article. Nope.
You would think that, after citing a 15 year old report by Jimmy Carter, these journalists would note that the Carter Center pointed out earlier this month that the report also “found that where safeguards for ballot integrity are in place – for example in Oregon, where the entire state has voted by mail since 1998 – there was little evidence of voter fraud.” Nope!
Great article guys, definitely not a lazy retread of arguments that more successful conservative outlets have already made!
How do they know there is no fraud? Is there a way to absolutely prove there is no fraud?