Say what you will about President Trump on this issue. He may not frame it right or whatever, but he is right that mail-in voting is a disaster. There is a possibility of fraud. Sorry, even The New York Times admitted that, and on top of those concerns, it’s the viability of this system. We’ve lost close to 30 million ballots in the last four elections. They’re gone. Lost forever. Still, the so-called fact-checkers say mail-in voting is pretty much fine.
There is no evidence to support this claim.
— AFP Fact Check ?? (@AFPFactCheck) July 21, 2020
“Voting by mail has been a secure part of our election system for many years,” Brennan Center election expert Max Feldman told us https://t.co/NbS0DP6hQa https://t.co/6HRgKw9Ae1
FACT CHECK: Vote by mail is safe and encouraged by the CDC. No data supports otherwise.https://t.co/NNtgOg7aGz
— America Votes (@AmericaVotes) April 16, 2020
This @nytimes story is a joke.
— Tim Murtaugh - Download the Trump 2020 app today! (@TimMurtaugh) April 9, 2020
Buried in there is this nugget:
“experts say that the mail voting system is more vulnerable to fraud than voting in person.”
Invalidates the whole story.
How much fraud is acceptable to them?@realDonaldTrump is correct.https://t.co/c0CJuPhkz8
In New Jersey, municipal elections in Paterson have been a disaster. One-in-five ballots were discovered to be fraudulent. Four people are being charged. In New York, their primaries from a month ago have yet to be called. As Fox News’s Brit Hume noted, it’s a “train wreck” (via NYT):
More than three weeks after the New York primaries, election officials have not yet counted an untold number of mail-in absentee ballots, leaving numerous closely watched races unresolved, including two key Democratic congressional contests.
The absentee ballot count — greatly inflated this year after the state expanded the vote-by-mail option because of the coronavirus pandemic — has been painstakingly slow, and hard to track, with no running account of the vote totals available.
In some cases, the tiny number of ballots counted has bordered on the absurd: In the 12th Congressional District, where Representative Carolyn B. Maloney is fighting for her political life against her challenger, Suraj Patel, only 800 of some 65,000 absentee ballots had been tabulated as of Wednesday, according to Mr. Patel, though thousands had been disqualified.
Another young insurgent candidate, Ritchie Torres, held a commanding lead in his Democratic House primary race after a count of machine-cast ballots on primary night. Mr. Torres, a New York City councilman, was leading a pack of contenders in the 15th Congressional District in the Bronx.
[…]
The delays in New York’s primaries raise huge concerns about how the state will handle the general election in November, and may offer a cautionary note for other states as they weigh whether to embrace, and how to implement, a vote-by-mail system because of the pandemic.
The primary reason for the delays is the sheer number of absentee ballots: In New York City, 403,203 ballots were mailed for the June primary; as a comparison, just 76,258 absentee and military ballots were counted in New York City in the 2008 general election, when Barack Obama was elected president.
[…]
Officials said they were also hamstrung by outdated technology, including using toner-and-tray copiers, instead of computerized scanners, to handle requests from candidates for copies of absentee ballots; those copies are often used in legal challenges to try to restore disqualified ballots or challenge the legitimacy of others.
Yeah, this is a bad way to run an election. And if fraud isn’t a top concern, though it should be as ballots are being mailed to people’s pets, the wait time might be just as or even more troubling. When November 2020 comes around, we can’t be waiting for a month to get the final results. Both sides hate each other. I agree with what some people are saying that we’re experiencing an intense level of disunity not seen since the start of the Civil War. A prolonged election will only exacerbate those feelings and it could get very ugly. Former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer noted that Oregon and Washington have experience with these types of elections.
Train wreck. https://t.co/kvidCahjA0
— Brit Hume (@brithume) July 18, 2020
This article should stop states dead in their tracks from attempting mass mail-in elections this November if those states haven’t done it before. WA and OR have proven track records. They can handle it. Most states can’t. https://t.co/enhHSasSIq
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) July 18, 2020
Our democracy’s greatest weakness, especially in today’s acrimonious environment, is a close election. The last thing we need is a bitter dispute about who the real winner is. Don’t tempt fate. States must not expand to all-mail unless they know they can do it well.
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) July 18, 2020
“They can handle it.” Yet, “our democracy’s greatest weakness, especially in today’s acrimonious environment, is a close election. The last thing we need is a bitter dispute about who the real winner is. Don’t tempt fate. States must not expand to all-mail unless they know they can do it well,” he added in his Twitter post.
I mean, there's no way this ends well if this mail-in voting scheme is expanded. No way. And there's no chance everyone is going to remember this either, further complicating the matter should states go through with this:
.@USPS says you should give mail in ballots at least 14 days round trip. No guarantees.
— Tony Dokoupil (@tonydokoupil) July 24, 2020
So if you plan to vote by mail, election day isn’t November 3rd.
It’s October 20th.
Or sooner.
Don’t be one of the *tens of thousands* of people whose vote wasn’t counted in 2016.