Editor's Note: This piece was co-authored by James McCoy.
In our second installment of mail-in voting, we cover two important issues. First, we deal with Democrats’ desire to entrust the process to the failing U.S. Postal Service, or as Kurt Schlichter terms it—“the federal DMV”. Second, we weigh Democrat denials of the potential for mail-in voter fraud.
U.S. Post Office as Guardian
The aphorism that one is known by the company one keeps dates back to ancient times in both Aesop and the Book of Proverbs. Its truth is as valid today as back in antiquity, especially for the Democratic Party in its efforts to win America’s 2020 presidential election.
Proponents of mail-in election balloting from the DNC to NPR to USA Today vigorously assert that it’s the best method for increasing voter participation and is unquestionably safe and secure. The question is participation by whom? The Dems want every illegal, felon and unregistered resident to vote in this election. Worse, they want the USPS to be the vehicle for delivering and retrieving these ballots.
As far back as May, Thomas Marshall, USPS General Counsel, warned that posted deadlines for requesting and casting mail-in ballots won’t work with the USPS’s delivery standards. He also advised that state and local election officials use first-class mail, which many blue states refuse to do. Mail-in voting has already proven to be a failure in New York State’s primary election since 30,000 ballots weren’t mailed to voters until the day before the election. Blue state election officials seem unwilling or unable to get ballots to voters in a timely way. USPS has warned 46 states and D.C. that it may be unable to deliver mail-in ballots on time to be counted due to overwhelming demand.
Another problem with the mail-in ballot effort is the fact that The National Association of Letter Carriers (union), representing nonrural USPS employees has endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential bid. We know that historically unions are all-in for Democratic presidential candidates and often go out of their way to help them. In 2016 unions gave more than $1.1B to Democrats and liberal groups. If you are a conservative, decide to vote by mail and receive mail from conservative groups, how much can you trust that your letter carrier will actually turn in your mail ballot? As we have indicated previously, progressives will go to great lengths to deny your votes.
The Denial of Mail-in Voter Fraud
In the face of President Trump’s concern about the process and security of mail-in ballots in the upcoming election, the liberal left and MSM have launched a no-holds-barred attack on his motives and an indubitable defense of that voting system. Democracy Docket, the leading platform for progressive advocacy on voting rights, champions the mail-in ballot as a way to expand voting rights and present it as completely safe.
The Brookings Institution asserts that there is no evidence that mail-in ballots increase electoral fraud, although it is difficult to weigh the evidence since California remains the only state that has used it for a national election. It points out that the process has several built-in protections against voter fraud including prosecution with prison and fines. If this were true, there would be no fraud in America.
The Brennan Center points to a framework of identity verification methods to assure that fraud is not committed. It even supports the notion that it is more likely that an American will be struck by lightning than to commit mail fraud by voting. Yet NOAA says over the last 20 years the United States averaged 51 annual lightning strike fatalities and 240,000 injuries, just behind flooding for deadly weather.
In order to support and facilitate mail-in voting, Democracy Docket advocates four mail-in voting guidelines: 1) Postage must be free or paid for by the government; 2) Ballots postmarked on or before election day must be counted; 3) When in doubt about signatures, count the vote; 4) Permit community organizations to ballot harvest.
Yet these guidelines for strengthening and facilitating the process clearly identify and underscore the innate mail-in ballot faults and where most voter fraud occurs.
Anyone who thinks of joining the Democrat advocacy of mail-in balloting should familiarize themselves with systems analysis, particularly Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). FTA is a top down, deductive failure analysis in which an undesired state of a system is analyzed using Boolean logic to combine a series of lower-level events. Sadly, the mail-in voting advocates have neglected to use such analysis.
As stated in Part I, the wisdom of the secret ballot lies in its safety and privacy provided by the private voting booth, free from intimidation and coercion. Allowing community groups to collect ballots from voter homes, as happened in California in 2016, freedom from intimidation and coercion becomes lost. Activists groups from Soros to BLM affiliates can enter homes to collect ballots and ballot integrity is history. Intimidation from family members or live-in helpers can also occur in homes and voting becomes a very public act against what our voting system is designed to be.
The reliability of signature verification with humans checking each ballot is imaginary on two accounts; the sheer number of ballots involved and the inexpert nature of the staff. The Brennan Center believes identity verification is gained from requiring personal information but it isn’t required in the national voter’s registration form or on most mail-in ballots like New Jersey. Voter-registration can also be manipulated through the “motor-voter” process that has allowed illegal aliens in southwestern states to register to vote while renewing a drivers’ license. Eighty-four thousand duplicate voter registrations were found recently in California alone.
A fair and professional assessment of the mail-in ballot system would reveal it is fraught with serious flaws and will produce illicit outcomes for our elections, just as Democrats intend. The clamor for mail-in ballots continues unabated and is clearly a solution in a desperate search for a problem.
Until now, perfidy has never been a legitimate outcome of our American voting process. The Democrats are fully committed to instilling this in the 2020 election.
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