Mail-in Voting and the Future of American Democracy
It’s been twenty years since the Bush-Gore election recount debacle in Florida with its chads, butterfly ballots, lawsuits, delay, and uncertainty...
The current stink in our banana republic electoral systems is mail-in voting. In 2007, Rep. Susan Davis introduced the Universal Right to Vote by Mail Act to Congress where it languishes. Even so, at National Conference of State Legislatures we learn that as of March this year, 26 states already have some form of mail-in voting, with five of those states conducting all their elections by mail. On August 1 in the New York Post, Michael Goodwin outlined some of the logistical nightmares of mail-in voting. Also worth checking out is this short video of the leonine Liz Wheeler: 5 Problems with Universal Mail-In Voting....
Here’s the bottom line: to vote for a federal official, one must be a U.S. citizen. But the states don’t verify for citizenship when they register voters, and this is especially the case in the states using automatic registration....
The states that use automatic voter registration -- or that allow noncitizens to vote in non-federal elections -- are maintaining voter registries which should not be used in the election of federal officials....
On August 10 we read in the Minneapolis Star Tribune of some 28 million missing mail-in ballots that “went poof between 2012 and 2018.”...
Even if a state’s voter registry were entirely correct, election integrity can still be undermined on the backend with discovered ballots, i.e. fraudulent ballots created by partisan poll workers. My favorite examples of this occurred in two Blue States: the 2004 election of Christine Gregoire in Washington and the 2008 election of Al Franken in Minnesota. Both elections appear to have been stolen by means of backroom ballots conveniently “discovered” by Democrats whose candidate lost in the initial vote count and in subsequent recounts....
Regardless of whether a state’s ballots are in-person, mail-in (including absentee), provisional, or some combination, without backend vetting of the ballots, elections can be stolen with discovered ballots, ballot harvesting, and whatever creative new swindle the Dems can dream up....
Video: 5 Problems with Universal Mail-In Voting, by Liz Wheeler on OAN, August 5, 2020: