Wisconsin was the first state to run a state-wide election by mail. The result is turning out to be an unmitigated disaster.
It is just now, over a month later, becoming clear how badly the mail-in election effort went.
Three tubs of absentee ballots that never reached voters were discovered in a postal center outside Milwaukee. At least 9,000 absentee ballots requested by voters were never sent, and others recorded as sent were never received. Even when voters did return their completed ballots in the mail, thousands were postmarked too late to count — or not at all.
More than a million completed absentee ballots had been returned by Election Day, April 7. That is a record for Wisconsin spring primary elections.
But for thousands of other voters, who never received their ballots, there was only one recourse: putting their health at risk and defying a stay-at-home order to vote in person during the coronavirus pandemic. Many simply chose not to show up.
Just two weeks later, Ohio attempted statewide by-mail voting and suffered the same kinds of issues. Thousands of voters made multiple phone calls and online applications for absentee ballots but never got them. Many voted in-person on election day at the only polling places open in the state, the county election boards.
Ohio health officials fear dozens of people contracted the Wuhan virus by making that dangerous trip. Ohio still hasn’t found several thousand ballots that were lost in transit going to the voters or being returned to election offices.
These mail-in ballot problems became apparent just as Texas Secretary of State David Whitley announced an investigation by his office uncovered 95,000 noncitizen residents who illegally registered to vote.
It was one of the largest discoveries of non-eligible voters by any one state. Conservative groups say Whitley’s inquiry produced real numbers to support their years of lawsuits and research. They say noncitizen voter fraud is significant, as opposed to the left’s contention that it is rare.
The likelihood most, if not all states have unproven mail-in ballot solutions and such illegal immigrant voting activity understandably has voter integrity advocates concerned.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has claimed mail-in voting will protect us from the Wuhan coronavirus, but evidence suggests mail-in balloting is no way to protect election integrity. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Some federal health officials have advocated for mail-in voting to reduce the possibility of Wuhan virus infections at polling places. Concerns for illegal voting by noncitizens have been in evidence for years Estimates are that nearly 1.5 million illegals voted in California’s presidential election in 2016.
In this crucial election year, the issues need to be put to rest long before November 3.
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.
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.
These problems are intertwined with the Left’s ominous proposal to conduct the presidential election this year via mail-in ballot across the country — thus infinitely increasing the opportunity for widespread fraud.
The disaster this could cause is illustrated by something President Trump talked about at one of his news conferences; namely, the settlement obtained by Judicial Watch from Los Angeles and the state of California over their failure to maintain the accuracy of their voter registration rolls.
The state and LA agreed to remove from the rolls 1.5 million individuals who remained registered even though they no longer were eligible to vote. Imagine what would have happened if 1.5 million ballot applications were simply mailed out to all of those individuals to addresses where they no longer live.
We actually don’t have to imagine. It is happening already in Michigan’s vote-by-mail applications sent out this week. A Michigan man who lives only with his wife only, their kids are grown, got five absentee ballot applications. The other three were for people who had not lived at the address for 24 years.
Multiply that across Michigan and ask yourself whether Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is simply incompetent, or someone far more sinister? The fact that even if only three-quarters of one percent of votes cast are illegal or fraudulent, as is estimated, that’s a million votes cast illegally across the nation.
The Kennedy and the first George W. Bush elections were both decided by far fewer than that.
These cases demonstrate that election fraud is ripe for anyone wanting to pick the fruit. There is little doubt fraud does occur and can compromise the integrity of the election process.
Not even the coronavirus can stop the upcoming presidential election, with most of the 2020 presidential primaries being completed. Soon enough, the general election will be upon us.
States should be doing everything they can to help everyone who is eligible to vote. But that doesn’t mean casting aside the safeguards in place to prevent elections from being stolen or compromised by administrative errors and fraud.
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