OP-ED / ARTICLES

September 9, 2024

The Massive Mail-In Voting Push

By Irene Lavor, Precinct Committeeman

We must wake up!  It may appear to many of us that, barring a corrupt one-sided justice system, Trump will surely be re-elected president of the United States in November 2024.  Unfortunately, Republicans will probably face a tougher climb in the general election than we realize.  There are two major reasons for this situation.  First, fundamental changes in state election laws have been made since the 2020 election without proper legislative approval.  Second, an alliance of left-wing federal, corporate, financial, and non-profit entities have given the Democratic Party advantages that the Republican Party may have trouble overcoming.  This brings me to my purpose for writing this piece.  Is the rise in mass mail-in voting a convenience or a pathway to fraud?

Perhaps the most alluring of all the electoral opportunities brought about by the pandemic and civil unrest was the beginning of universal, unsolicited mail-in ballots which are still in use in some states. In the book “Our Broken Elections”, Mr. Fund and Mr. von Spakovsky wrote that, “the flood of millions of mail-in ballots opened the system to unprecedented confusion and largely untraceable fraud.”  They also wrote, “There’s a reason that a bipartisan commission co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter in 2005 called mail-in absentee ballots the ‘largest source of potential voter fraud’ and that most countries in the European Union have banned ‘postal voting’ over the same concerns.

According to the Census Bureau, 43 percent of American voters cast ballots by mail in 2020.  This is double the 21 percent who did so in 2016.  The year 2020 was an exceptional year because of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  However, the United States is still experiencing a longer-term transition to an absentee ballot system from a voting in-person system.  Right now California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia have “mostly mail voting” systems according to research done by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

The 2020 election saw record levels of voter turnout, but the shift away from traditional voting methods also corresponds with a decline in trust in America’s electoral system.  A poll done in October 2023 by the Public Affairs Council, found that only 37 percent of Americans believe the 2024 elections will be both “honest and open,” and 43 percent expressed “serious doubts” about election integrity.  The question becomes whether the loss of trust stems from losing candidates saying that the elections were stolen from them, or from America changing to a system that prioritizes convenience over one that prioritized integrity.        

 A study based on a Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey in December 2023 examined the likely effect that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 presidential election.  The survey suggested that roughly 28.2 percent of respondents who voted by mail committed at least one type of behavior that is “under most circumstances, illegal” and so basically amounts to voter fraud.  According to the Heartland/Rasmussen researchers, “This means that more than one-in-four ballots cast by mail in 2020 were likely cast fraudulently, and thus should not have been counted.  The researchers did note that,  “…there are narrow exceptions where a surveyed behavior may be legal, like filling out a mail-in ballot on behalf of another voter if that person is blind, illiterate, or disabled, and requests assistance.”  In conclusion, the researchers felt confident in their overall assessment that the level of mail-in ballot fraud was over 25 percent signifying an actual Trump win, and that the “best available evidence suggests that mail-in ballot fraud significantly impacted the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden.”  More than 43 percent of the 2020 votes were cast by mail.  This is the highest percentage in U.S. history.  It is important and of interest to note that the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic was often done without legislative approval.  Also included in this study was a chart from Cybersecurity and Infrastructures Security Agency (CISA) and the America First Legal (AFL) which stated, “For mail-in voting some of the risk under the control of election officials during in-person voting shifts to outside entities, such as ballot printers, mail processing facilities, and the U.S. Postal Service.”

Leftist supporters of “all mail-in” voting like to point to the cost savings to local governments as a main benefit of this system.  It is different from “early” or “absentee” voting because all ballots are distributed and returned by mail which marks an end to traditional neighborhood, precinct-based voting.  Unfortunately, depending on the reliability of the U.S. Postal Service to, in essence, conduct our elections this potentially presents major problems, especially when related to mail delivery.  Take for example that, in Florida in 2020 it is estimated that thousands of absentee ballots were not counted because they arrived after Election Day.

In January 2023, the Public Interest Legal Foundation published a report on the November 2022 elections which stated:  (1) California election officials were unable to account for approximately 10 million ballots that had been mailed to California voters before the election; (2) election officials rejected 226,250 ballots that had been mailed back of which more than 57,000 were rejected because they arrived after the November 15th deadline for being counted.  The experiences in two of the largest states in the country speak volumes about the dangers of entrusting our election processes to the U.S. Postal Service!

In addition, voting by mail intensifies the possibility of voter fraud because it makes it possible for an individual or individuals to collect ballots and dump them.  Think about it.  There is no possibility of checking voter ID with mailed ballots.  According to Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, vote-buying is easier with mail-in ballots.

Delaware had enacted laws that attempted to grant every voter the opportunity to vote by mail and register to vote up to the day of the general election.  In October 2022 the Delaware Supreme Court struck down the vote-by-mail and same day voter registration statues because those provisions, without permission, expanded those practices far beyond the limitations set in the Delaware Constitution.

America First Legal uncovered documents from the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA proving that CISA was aware of “three major challenges” with mail-in voting, seen during the primary elections.  Those “three major challenges” are:  physically mailing and returning the ballots would be difficult, high numbers of ballots would be incorrectly completed, and there would likely be a shortage of personnel to process ballots.

Fraud must be looked at to be detected and most election officials aren’t that excited about investigating for fraud.  Honest researchers admit no one knows the amount of fraud that is occurring in elections.  Defenders of the status quo like to point out the lack of proven fraud cases associated with mail-in voting, and unless someone confesses, the crime is basically undetectable.

All we need to do is look at how bulk-mail compares with in-person voting which has long been the gold standard of election security.  At the voting site, voters are protected from any kind of political influence.  A ballot is given only after the list of eligible voters is checked and their ID is presented.  Voters are monitored while they vote.  The secrecy of the ballot is always kept.  Finally, a formal chain of custody assures that ballots are handled securely until they are counted.

By contrast, bulk-mail voting in many states starts with unrequested ballots being mailed to millions of names on poorly maintained voter lists.  Most ballots are received by their intended recipients, voted and returned.  However, others get lost in the mail or are delivered to people who have moved or died.  Others go to some mentally incapacitated voters who are “helped” by third parties to cast their vote.  Believe it or not, some ballots are even sold!  To compound and make matters worse, signature matching is used as a substitute for actual ID verification.  However, signature matching is a vague or ill-defined “art”, with no objective standards, and which has been demonstrated many times to be unreliable.  Ten states and The District of Columbia verify that a mail-in ballot envelope has been signed, but signature verification is not conducted.

Of course, the Far Left supports “all mail-in voting”.  They want to use dirty voter rolls to print and mail ballots.  This means that hundreds, if not millions, of ballots are circulating in the mail creating a huge amount of “live” but unmarked ballots that can be corruptly cast!  Think about this.  In 2022 in Nevada, it was estimated that approximately 1.8 million ballots were mailed to the state’s voters, but only about 800,000 ballots were cast.  Just think about the kind of fraud that can occur with those other one million ballots!

Are you aware that the federal government is using its vast resources and its largest agencies including the Dept. of Education, the Dept. of Agriculture, the Dept. of Health and Human Services, and the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development to register new voters and expand mail-in balloting with the help of nonprofits?  This is being done through Biden’s Executive order 14019 which states, “The head of each agency shall evaluate ways in which the agency can, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, promote voter registration and voter participation.”  This order has already forced U.S. Marshalls to change more than 900 contracts with prisons and jails to provide voter registration documents and to make it easier for inmates to use mail-in ballots.

Biden’s executive order includes the instruction for federal agencies to find ways to distribute “vote-by-mail ballot application forms” along with assisting applicants in completing the application “in a manner consistent with all relevant State laws.”  Aren’t elections under the purview of states, not the federal government?  Wouldn’t it be a problem to let the president decide where massive resources are channeled?  This is why the Founders gave election authority to the states and not to the federal executive.

It only makes common sense to the average American citizen that ballots submitted through the mail are inherently less secure than verified, in-person voting by a citizen who shows identification before casting his or her ballot.  The NCSL cautions that “if a voter is marking a ballot at home, and not in the presence of elections officials, there may be more opportunity for coercion by family members or others.”  A recent NCSL study indicates that 28 states, including the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, currently offer “no-excuse” absentee voting, which means that any voter can request and cast an absentee ballot without giving a reason.  Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and the District of Columbia automatically mail absentee ballots to all voters.  In the remaining fifteen states such as Texas, voters must give an acceptable excuse (such as illness or disability, being out of state, or being overseas on Election Day) to qualify for an absentee ballot.

The fact is that the Left has come to the conclusion that the key to winning elections is not winning votes---it is winning ballots!

In the words of Michael Savage, “Once you start tolerating anything, you start to tolerate everything.  When anything goes, everything goes.”  We must go to war against the mass mail-in ballots!  It will be impossible to have a secure election this year if mass vote-by-mail operations continue the way that they are!  Also, signatures MUST be verified on all mailed ballots!

Mr. Jack McPherrin, a research editor at the Heartland Institute and one of the authors of the previously mentioned study, argues that the United States is capable of going back to a system where the majority of people, on Election Day, present ID and vote in person, and the country knows the results by the next day.  He said, “It’s absurd to think we can’t do that.  We’ve done that many times in the past and we can continue to do that moving forward; we just need to revert to the systems that we had in place in 2016, 2012, and 2008.”

According to McPherrin, “What can be more important than ensuring election security in a democratic republic?  I can’t think of a single other thing that’s more important because it’s the foundation of our entire constitutional republic, and without secure elections, we will not have a functioning democratic republic for much longer.”

Many Republicans say that we must match the mail-in efforts of the Democrats to win the 2024 election.  You and I both know that the cheaters will try to steal this election if we don’t do everything in our power to stop them.   I firmly believe that we can do ballot chasing, not ballot harvesting, as I believe Turning Point USA is trying to do right now.  We can always vote early in-person or drop our ballot off at early voting sites.  We can also drop our ballot off on Election Day at election voting sites.  Isn’t the integrity of our elections worth the effort, or are we going to be sheeple and go along with the fraudulent actions of the Left because we choose the easy way.  I leave that to your consciences to answer.

“If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are.  I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that can result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”  President Ronald Reagan

Irene Lavor, Precinct Committeeman 178, LD17.