How Risky Is Vote-By-Mail?

By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD

As I’ve written before, once upon a time I was heavily involved in political activity. Although my interest in politics has never waned, my involvement has and my political activities now are pretty much limited to voting and watching from the stands.
But watch I do. And as I watched I’ve noted that either I have moved too far to the right (evolved, they would say) or the party has moved too far to the left; further away from not only my political views, but my moral center as well.
It has always bothered me that the party of my former allegiance never seemed too concerned about ballot integrity, going so far as to oppose any form of voter ID. To me it seemed a simple and logical method of protecting our franchise lest we nullify legitimate votes.
But in our upside-down world, the claim is now being made that nationwide vote-by-mail is the answer to cleaner and fairer elections and will enfranchise all those who are being discriminated against by the (fill in the blank: white, rich, Republican) power elite. Of course it will, since, according to the proponents, there is really little concern for voter fraud since it is almost nonexistent. That’s why voter-ID laws do not protect the ballot, they only serve to depress the vote of the unfavored by the (white, rich, Republican) power elite.
So it is just more reasonable to vote-by-mail, just like it was peaceful moms, veterans, and seniors who just happened to be standing by a federal courthouse that was being firebombed in the middle of the night. You see how easy it is to just make stuff up?
Before we delve into the world of political fantasy, I think it might be time to take note of a recent report by The Heritage Foundation: “Four Stolen Elections: The Vulnerabilities of Absentee and Mail-In Ballots,” which was just published mid-July. The report by Heritage’s Hans A. von Spakovsky opens:
“[C]hanging the U.S. election system to no-fault absentee balloting, in which anyone can vote with a mail-in ballot without a reason, or to mail-only elections, in which voters no longer have the ability to vote in person, is an unwise and dangerous policy that would disenfranchise voters and make fraud far easier.
“Mail-in ballots are completed and voted outside the supervision and control of election officials and outside the purview of election observers, destroying the transparency that is a vital hallmark of the democratic process.”
And it uses four examples to underscore a 1998 report by Florida that the “lack of in-person, at the polls accountability makes absentee ballots the tool of choice for those inclined to commit vote fraud.”
So first we need to define terms: Absentee voting is where a voter requests a ballot from the election commissioners due to his unavailability (or unwillingness) to go to the polls on Election Day. Vote-by-mail is a system in which the election officials automatically mail a ballot to all registered voters, some of whom have moved or died.
Typical of the problems is the activity known as “vote harvesting,” where the law allows any person to pick up completed absentee ballots and deliver them to the local election office. Often the vote harvesters fill in absentee ballot requests from vulnerable persons, many of whom don’t understand what the “paperwork” is for — one such voter said he was told it was his application for food stamps.
The return address on the application is often the harvesters’ or the campaign office where the ballots are duly marked and returned for counting.
The centerpiece of the report is the stories of four elections where vote by mail or absentee ballots had been fraudulently used to change the results: a school board election in Fresno County, Calif., in 1991; a mayoral election in Miami, Fla., 1997; a Democratic mayoral primary in East Chicago, Indiana, 2003; and a congressional election in North Carolina in 2018.
Each resulted in a finding of election fraud, resulting in prison sentences, new elections, and in one case the election result was voided and the “losing” candidate was declared the winner.
And in each, certain patterns developed which skated — or nearly skated — under the radar because they took place in campaign offices, private homes, and hospital rooms. The fraudulent schemes included stolen ballots, use of false registration addresses, false witnesses, photocopied ballots, payment to “poor and homeless voters” for their votes, and, of course, voting the dead.
Many absentee voters lived in low-income housing. When one of the vote harvesters was asked why there, he said those voters were “a lot less likely to ask any questions.” In that case the judge found that those collecting fraudulent ballots systematically preyed on “the naive, the neophytes, the infirm, and the needy” which subjected them to “unscrupulous election tactics.”
In the Florida case, a man who signed as a witness on absentee witnesses had been dead for four years, and one elderly woman was pressured to vote in the hospital where she was recovering from a stroke. She said the harvester “badgered” her to vote for a particular candidate, finally taking the ballot and marking it himself. “They know our eyesight is not good and we are not well. What kind of person would take advantage of the elderly?” she asked.
A Miami-Dade County grand jury in 2012 reported: “[C]harges were filed against fifty-five persons, fifty-four of the fifty-five were convicted, the other was sent to a pretrial diversion program. In a lawsuit filed by the losing candidate, the judge found that fraud was so extensive he threw out the absentee ballots and declared the losing candidate the winner.
“The differing approaches to the return of absentee ballots can be seen in the contrast between, for instance, North Carolina and California. North Carolina allows (apart from the voter) only ‘a voter’s near relative or the voter’s verifiable legal guardian’ to return an absentee ballot. California had a similar law, but amended it in 2016, effective in the 2018 election. Prior to the change, only the relatives of a voter or someone living in the same household could return an absentee ballot. California eliminated that restriction and now allows a voter to ‘designate any person to return the ballot,’ exposing California residents to intimidation and pressure in their homes by representatives of candidates, campaigns, and political parties,” the report said.
Vote-by-mail, now promoted by the Democratic Party and numerous left-wing entities, causes its own problems. The Heritage report noted a typical story from one of its colleagues. She grew up in Washington State where elections are conducted all by mail. Even though she moved from the state in 2012 and is no longer an eligible voter there, she still receives her mail-in ballot every year, as does her sister who has Down syndrome and who was somehow registered without her family’s knowledge.
Of course it doesn’t take much of an imagination to see ballots piling up in mailrooms of apartment houses, unclaimed by the actual voter but gobbled up by those whose credentials to vote can never be challenged.
Some mailed ballots are lost by the Postal Service. According to the report:
“A Public Interest Legal Foundation analysis of reports filed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) on the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 elections [found] more than 28 million mail-in ballots effectively disappeared — their fate is listed as ‘unknown’ by the EAC. . . . An example of the risk posed by relying on mail delivery for the important task of making sure that a voter’s ballot gets into the ballot box is illustrated by the April 7, 2020, primary election in Wisconsin. News reports indicated that many voters never received the absentee ballots they had requested, or received them too late. After the election, ‘three large tubs of absentee ballots’ were discovered in a mail-processing facility. . . .
“Similarly, ‘thousands of residents who requested an absentee ballot’ for the June 2, 2020, primary election in the District of Columbia never received their requested absentee ballots.”
So here we are. Voting by mail is the new demand from the left. Now you know why.
(You can each Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday at 10 a.m. CDT on Faith On Trial at IowaCatholicRadio.com.)