End mail-in vote fraud
In the recent presidential election, Wisconsin had a high turnout, 72.3 percent, of which Joseph Biden took 49.6 percent — 250,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and enough to win. For a candidate whose rallies virtually no one attended, and whose political party, in response to recent rioting and looting, was passive, that's pretty good. Or is it?
The answer to that may depend on the kind of ballots that were cast — whether they were cast in person or through the mail. Frank Miele describes the process of the first:
[Y]ou first make an active choice to vote, confirm your identity as a registered voter to a poll worker, then mark your ballot privately but in the presence of other people, and finally hand it off to a poll worker who scans it directly into a vote-counting machine while you watch. In other words, you establish your legal right to vote and have a secure chain of custody of your ballot until it is scanned, which you yourself [and you alone] participate in.
Adam Liptak of the N.Y. Times reports on a portion of mail-in voting:
The [election] board tossed out some ballots because they arrived without the signature required on the outside of the return envelope. It rejected one that said "see inside" where the signature should have been. And it debated what to do with ballots in which the signature on the envelope did not quite match the one in the county's files.
"This 'r' is not like that 'r,'" Judge Augustus D. Aikens Jr. said, suggesting that a ballot should be rejected.
Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor here, disagreed. "This 'k' is like that 'k,' " he replied, and he persuaded his colleagues to count the vote.
As can be seen, this is a very subjective, uncertain process — a far cry from the one described by Miele. But, at least in the example, which was conducted in the presence of a reporter, and in which the officials were perhaps of different parties, the officials appeared to be conscientiously trying to make the correct determination.
But what about determinations made not in the presence of a reporter, or with officials of the same party? To this, Josh Harrow writes:
[It is] far too easy to imagine one-party Democratic machine jurisdictions padding the vote tally for their candidate by mass non-disqualification of mail-in ballots that would otherwise merit closer scrutiny.
Where would such ballots come from? According to J. Christian Adams and Hans Von Spakovsky, it is from the over-inclusion of names in the voting rolls. They elaborate:
There are serious problems with the accuracy of every single state's voter rolls, some far worse than others.
People are registered multiple times. In some states, the dead remain on the rolls as active registrants for years, sometimes decades. Voter rolls are missing basic information like apartment numbers, birthdates and sometimes even full names.
There are other problems as well. Suffice it to say, the opportunity for fraud with mail-in votes is clearly there. If that opportunity has been taken, can we, through a recount, prove it? The answer is no. Once the mail-in ballots are accepted, they are thrown in with the in-person ballots. Even if officials find out later that a dead person sent in a ballot, we don't know how that dead person voted.
So if we find evidence that something in the recent election suggests that there was mail-in voter fraud (and there is such evidence), there's nothing we can do to prove that. Ever.
Although we cannot have a recount that would discover and erase fraudulent mail-in votes, and potentially throw the state electors to Trump, there's one thing that we can do. We can have a re-vote — one that includes early voting and (restricted) absentee voting, protocols to protect against COVID-19, but not mail-in voting. This would not award anything to anyone; it simply would provide a far more trustworthy vote.
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There is more.
I oppose mail-in ballots that are not properly applied for absentee ballots. Mass mailing to all "registered" voters is a recipe for vote fraud.
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