Stealing The 2020 Election Through The U.S. Mail

by J. Frank Bullitt, I & I Editorial Board: 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.

t 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Voter registration rolls are notoriously inaccurate and out of date, containing the names of voters who are deceased, have moved, or otherwise have become ineligible.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.
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J. Frank Bullitt writes for the Issues & Insights (@InsightsIssues) The I & I Editorial Board's new site is formed by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page.

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