Mail ballots bundled

Beware the Left’s Mail-in Voting Scheme

Offered as an ostensible solution to social distancing concerns brought about by Covid-19, the national campaign for mail-in ballots should not be confused with current, state-run absentee voting systems. Despite what proponents say, it’s not the same.

The Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020 was authored by two Democrat Senators, including Minnesota’s own Amy Klobuchar. There are many local offshoots that duplicate the intent of the bill.

Worth noting is that the mail-in ballot scheme is a partisan plan, originating with the political left. It is nearly universally opposed by Republicans. It is not mere myth or anecdote that election fraud is primarily a tool of the left. While there have been instances of Republican candidates and their backers caught committing vote fraud, the overwhelming majority of news stories about people prosecuted for election crimes have involved Democrat operatives. It’s so commonplace on the left, that Democrat leaders scarcely even try to hide it anymore.

Take for example the 2016 Democrat Primary elections, where leaders of the Democratic National Committee admitted in court that the election was rigged against candidate Bernie Sanders, in favor of Hilary Clinton. In fact, besides acknowledging that the committee broke it’s own rules and bylaws regarding impartiality, lawyers for the DNC argued that it had no obligation to conduct a fair election. They asserted that the DNC would have been within its rights to “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.” By their leaders’ own admission, the 2016 Democrat primary was a show intended to create an illusion of democracy.

The attorneys representing the DNC actually argued that since Sanders’ supporters knew the primaries were rigged, any potential accountability the DNC may have had was nullified, because Sanders supporters chose to participate, anyway!

With attitudes about the democratic process such as those being made brazenly plain in open court, it’s hardly unreasonable to question the motives of any election process changes offered by that camp.

Contrary to popular understanding, elections, even for Congress or president of the United States are and have always been state business. It’s a key principle of federalism that acts to compartmentalize and limit the potential impact of fraudulent voting on national politics. Klobuchar’s bill would overturn that centuries-old bedrock of our federal republic and force every state to follow her low-security, purely partisan national election plan, irrespective of the nuances of those state’s particular election statutes.

Election law is deceptively complex. Minnesota’s election statutes are a full 13 interdependent chapters with hundreds of rules promulgated by the secretary of state. Altering any portion of one chapter without very careful consideration of the whole can send consequences, intended or unintended rippling through the entire system. The same can easily be said of the other 49 states. A federal dictate that attempts a one-size-fits-all approach would have disastrous consequences for the various security checks and balances, auditing and reporting mechanisms when applied across 50 distinct and complex systems. Chaos and uncertainty are the only sure outcomes. The potential for messy recounts with “discovered” ballots, election contests and other lawsuits would be enormous.

Even ballots now mailed as part of the established absentee processes are problematic. Data from the Federal Election Assistance Commission shows that between 2012 and 2018, more than 28 million mail-in ballots are unaccounted for. That amounts to one out of every five absentee and mail-in ballots, gone missing. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which investigated the numbers said that “the sheer volume of unaccounted for ballots raises serious doubts about election security.” The national plan for mail-in ballots could only exacerbate the existing problem.

The plan is to automatically mail a ballot to every single registered voter in the country, without the need for the voter to have requested it, as would be required with traditional absentee ballots.

Around the nation, the voter rolls kept by the states are notoriously inaccurate. This is largely because Democrat secretaries of state refuse to follow the federal Voting Rights and Help America Vote Acts’ requirement to routinely remove dead, moved and inactive voters from the rosters. Left wing organizations frequently sue Republican secretaries of state to attempt to prevent them carrying out that legally mandated duty. Inflated voter rolls obscure detection of anomalies, like more ballots than registered voters turning up in some precincts and frustrate attempts to accurately audit election results.

A CBS Affiliate’s investigation in Los Angeles recently found over 200 dead people on the voter rolls who had been actively voting despite being six feet under.

Mailing ballots to millions of people who have not specifically requested one with an up-to-date application will unquestionably result in “loose” ballots – unaccounted for ballots that have been mis-delivered and could wind up anywhere. Voters who choose to vote in person will still be mailed an unsecured, duplicate ballot that could be collected and voted by literally anyone. Sophisticated fraudsters utilizing common “get out the vote” practices would know who has or is planning to vote in person, but even if a voter turned up at the polls and a mail-in ballot in his name was sent in, there would be no consequences. The extra ballot may or may not be rejected, depending on the circumstances. The legitimate voter, not intending to vote twice could not be prosecuted and the fraudulent voter, having only used the “borrowed” identity of a legitimate voter could never be traced.

This will enable ballot harvesting on an unprecedented scale. Ballot harvesting is a practice where third parties gather bundles of ballots on behalf of voters and deliver them by hand or by post to election officials. Because of the high risk of fraud associated with ballot harvesting, it is now illegal in most states, but Minnesota permits a limited number of ballots to be submitted this way and there is a lawsuit filed by the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee, backed by the ACLU and other left-aligned organizations, that seeks to completely do away with Minnesota’s restrictions on ballot harvesting.

It’s a rarity, but it was a Republican operative who made the most recent headlines, getting indicted for an illegal ballot harvesting scheme (among numerous other charges) in North Carolina.

One scant security feature offered by the mail-in ballot plan is the requirement of a witness signature. A person with ill-intent would then theoretically be slowed down by needing the names of two registered voters to sign each fraudulent ballot. However, another lawsuit by the Minnesota Alliance for Retired Americans seeks to eliminate the witness signature requirement from absentee and mail-in ballots. They also seek to strike the requirement that ballots be postmarked by Election Day to be counted.

Since the aims of the lawsuits to allow ballot harvesting and to do away with witness signature requirements are supported by the secretary of state and attorney general, no defense of Minnesota’s statutes is being offered, which, unless another organization, such as the Minnesota Voters Alliance is successful in intervening will leave the court to do away with these anti-fraud protections by consent decree.

Hans Von Spakovsky is a noted expert on voter fraud in America. As an attorney, he was employed by the Justice Department’s voting division and later by the Federal Election Commission. He is the author of two books and numerous papers about Voter Fraud. When he weighed in on the vote by mail plan, he said, “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.”

As Von Spakovsky pointed out, mail-in ballots can be done in secret and if the left gets its way, without even the need to forge a witness signature. The partisan and citizen oversight offered by polling place election judges, ballot boards and poll challengers are swept away by the mail-in balloting plan. With Minnesota’s secretary of state being secretive and refusing to release public records that are crucial for determining the extent of voter fraud, there will be no transparency. Vote buying and coercion are also much easier to accomplish away from prying eyes and when one person can drop an unlimited number of ballots off at a precinct or just into a mailbox.

The Heritage Foundation, where Von Spakovsky currently works has documented over 60 cases of vote buying in its election fraud database.

Stuffing the ballot box will be easier than ever with millions of unaccounted for ballots in circulation. Those loose ballots will be seen as a valuable commodity. Remember, our votes control trillions of dollars and unfathomable power. People seeking control of those things will want to gain control of as many of those ballots as possible.

Just recently, a south Philadelphia election judge and Democrat committeeman pled guilty to accepting bribes to stuff ballot boxes for local Democrat candidates, a practice he’d engaged in for years before being caught. His scheme required him to surreptitiously mark ballots as fast as he could in a voting booth on Election Day to stuff the ballot box. With mail-in voting, he could have done it from the comfort of his living room and dropped the completed, fraudulent ballots into any mailbox anonymously.

The current national push for a new mail-in voting scheme doesn’t simply risk expanding voter fraud, it invites it.

UPDATE

Case in point: A New Jersey municipal election that took place in May could be considered a canary in the coal mine – an early test of the effect of the covid-driven mail-in balloting scheme. Among other irregularities, a full 20% of the ballots cast in Patterson, NJ were found to be fraudulent. City council members are among those charged with participating in voter fraud conspiracies. Lawsuits have ensued. In short, the election unfolded exactly as  this paper predicts.

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