I&I Editorial
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.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Totally agree..DEMOCRATS would do ANYTHING for power
Republicans would destroy
the Post Office in order to win.
But that’s the only way Pelosi can become president. The 20th Amendment says that a sitting president and his admin must be out of the White House by January 20th. If the election results cannot be determined by then due to mail in voting then the next in line to be president is speaker of the house Pelosi.
That’s why they have already brought up having to remove Trump when he refuses to leave on January 20th.
which is why we want the republicans to win back the majority, the the republican speaker will be president. The house changes the first week in January.
You seem not to follow the OP.
If they can’t get the results by January 20, Pelosi remains the Speaker.
Although by the same token, Trump remains the President, as the results are indeterminate.
No, not really important. What happens is that the EC will convene on December 14, 2021 and select a President. If they fail, the House immediately goes into session to pick a President. It is not at all important who wins House races in 2020 if the election makes its way to the House because it is the current House that decides. But it is not a roll call of Representatives, but each state delegation gets one vote (DC is out of this entirely). They can only vote for the top 3 in the EC vote totals and whoever gets 26 votes wins. There is no rules about how the delegation makes its selection (apart from having to be a top 3 finisher at the EC), but it is expected that it will go on party lines or possibly on the state popular election results. In spite of the current Democratic majority, a Presidential election pushed to the House in 2020 would probably pick Trump because of the composition of the state by state delegations in the current House. If the election is close enough to be pushed into the House (due to a tie or a couple of electors flaking out on “their” candidate, it still would be very likely that the Republican would win. For example, Trump won 30 states in 2016 and Clinton 20 (plus DC). To be clear, Trump did win states with about 56% of the population of the country, so it is not that he snuck in solely on some highly improbable collection of low population states.
Here is a point I haven`t seen anyone discussing that I think is key with mail in voting. The appointment of a SCOTUS replacement for RBG.
The Dems know that Biden will not beat Trump and with mail in voting the result may take months or even a year to verify. During that period the left will say Trump has not officially won thus any and all presidential appointments or EO`s are illegal.
It seems a precedent has already been set for SC replacements in an election year.
Results make take a month, possibly two. If it takes a year, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than SC confirmations.
Any person ineligible to vote who sends in a mail in ballot is commiting mail fraud and could face criminal prosecution. That is also true of eligible voters who send in a duplicate ballot. This is going to create a large number of unintentional criminals.
We don’t need any more evidence. We’ve seen vote-by-mail debacles for a number of elections now. Heck, the very fact that Democrats want it so badly is proof enough that it’s fraudulent. The problem is that we can’t seem to finally end it, regardless of the proof that it’s fraudulent.
well, you know if (or actually when) Trump wins, the democrats won’t delay in alleging voter fraud.
Fraud and chaos are features and not bugs to the crime syndicate masquerading as a political party known as the CPUSA or democrats.
Burning it all down by any means necessary is their Jonestown Kool-Aid true belief.
There is no plan for after that because destroyers can never create.
It cannot NOT result in fraud. In statistical process control, you identify “opportunities for error and zealously eliminate them or mitigate them because each instance that actually happens costs a lot of money to fix later, especially when you are repeating the process over and over millions of times. People try to get to six sigma – 3 errors per million operations. Think of air flight – which is considerably higher than that. Now think of voting by mail where 25% of ballots in NYC recently were rejected and 100K were rejected in an election in LA. Where over 10% of the stimulus checks did not reach the people. In a study by CBS, they sent out 100 test ballots and 3% never made it back, and many more took weeks to get back which in effect would be invalid ballots. The errors alone are going to be in the 3-10% range, 4.8-16MM – way more than the margins of victory. Then add in the opportunities for fraud – ballot harvesting, one person filling in for the family; people filling in unused ballots, easily produced counterfeit ballots by the Dems or by foreign powers, etc, etc – again, the opportunties for fraud are basically almost every ballot. Millions upon millions. And statistics tell us if it is possible a certain % will happen.
Admit it, it’s not voter fraud your worried about per se. You’re only against mail-in voting because you think Trump voters are more likely to vote in person than Biden voters, and that the only way Trump wins is if Biden supporters are too afraid of the virus to vote in person.
Although you noted the PA politician’s party affiliation as (D) you failed to note the NC case which was far more egregious as a (R) perpetrator. Fraud is and has been a bi-partisan problem. Are you a reporter or a political operative?
I totally agree with the author of this story, It was Democrats who pushed mail-in voting for the primaries .. And they’re pushing it again for the November 3 general elections.
As for me, I’ve been voting in person for decades, and I intend to do so on November 3rd. The only exception was with the Maryland primary .. I voted by mail, and still wonder if my vote was ever counted. The November elections are too precious to allow the Democrats to use mail-in ballots that would bring about only fraud and chaos.
It totally makes sense, we should have people wait in long voting lines for hours, already anxious because of Covid, and potential infection than have people safely vote by mail. All these people need to stop forcing us into their Darwin games, Murica, that’s what you’re winning.