Tag Archives: Ballot Harvesting

Ballot “Access” Or Fraud, Vote “Suppression” Or Security

15 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by in Election Fraud, Voting Rights

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Do a search of “suppression” on Twitter and you’ll be treated to an uninterrupted stream of lefty hallucinations and shrieks about GOP efforts to bring back Jim Crow, subvert democracy, and deny people their right to vote. Every state-level initiative to shore up election integrity is labeled suppression. Well, what we should suppress is the country’s headlong plunge into ballot debasement and jobbery. Election fraud is not new, as the Supreme Court noted in 2008. Ballot harvesting is not new. And we knew well ahead of the 2020 presidential election that the usual safeguards against election fraud were being severely compromised. These changes leveraged vulnerabilities that were of concern to the Left in the not too distant past. Now, any mention provokes indignance!

You Gotta Get Up To Participate

Voting is usually a hassle, but the right to vote does not mean voting must be made effortless; it does not relieve the right-holder of obligations to exert what effort might be necessary, including minor inconveniences to verify that their vote is legitimate. COVID-19 gave momentum to those seeking to eliminate certain obligations associated with voting. After all, exposure to a deadly virus at a polling place would have represented more than a minor inconvenience. In response, 28 state governments instituted changes to expand mail-in voting in 2020 in addition to compromises such as allowing late ballots to count, and the changes were often made without legislative authority.

Predictably, these changes enabled widespread fraud, Even now, after many lawsuits over 2020 election fraud were dismissed on procedural grounds, there remain a large number of election fraud cases in the courts. A substantial share of the voting public believes that fraud occurred on a massive scale. The perceived illegitimacy of the 2020 election represents a real threat to the stability of our Republic.

For the People?

It’s unfortunate that relieving the minor inconveniences imposed on voters creates major opportunities for fraud, but it appears to be in the interest of some factions to loosen those screws. Thus, we have a piece of federal legislation called the “For the People Act”, or H.R. 1 (the omnibus election transformation bill), which has passed the House on a strictly partisan vote and is now in the Senate. The bill would completely usurp the primary (though not exclusive) power of states to regulate elections under the Elections Clause of Article I of the Constitution. The breadth and reach of H.R. 1 would be deemed unconstitutional under any sane interpretation. Here is Hans von Spakovsky:

“H.R. 1 would mandate same-day and automatic voter registration, and encourage vote trafficking of absentee ballots. It would eviscerate state voter ID laws and limit the ability of states to verify the accuracy of their voter registration lists.”

And there is much more in the bill that would undermine the integrity of elections, including registration of the many disenfranchised 16- and 17-year-olds who have long been denied votes. A somewhat more detailed summary of H.R. 1 is provided by Conrad Black. It would:

“…compel states to accept mailed-in votes for 15 days prior to and 10 days after Election Day; set up automatic and online voter registration; prohibit review of the eligibility of voters; compel acceptance of ballots cast in the wrong precincts; bar the removal of the ineligible voters from the rolls; permit ballot harvesting; ban any voter identification laws; consign to unelected officials the redrawing of congressional districts; infringe upon free speech by the imposition of ‘onerous legal and administrative burdens on candidates, civic groups, unions, and non-profit organizations’; and establish a disturbingly named ‘Commission to Protect Democratic Institutions’ in order to end-run the courts.”

IDs Required When It Suits Them

We are told that the disenfranchised can’t be expected to produce identification. Is that so? But identification is required in most jurisdictions in order to receive a COVID vaccination, and there are discussions of how we’ll need to produce cards or “vaccine passports” to participate in a wide variety of activities. But an ID for voting is “suppression”?

Lacking identification, how are individuals expected to become “enfranchised” as a functioning members of society? Yes, if they are citizens then they have a right to vote. But one person, one vote requires some means of verified identity. If they know so much as to vote their pocketbooks, yet will not fulfill a simple obligation to produce identification in order to exercise that right, should they be accommodated?

Of course, there are individuals who need a “helping hand” in order to obtain proper identification, but short of inserting subcutaneous microchips, those individuals must be entrusted to keep it in their possession. That certainly doesn’t provide an excuse to cast aside rules intended to safeguard election integrity.

Is it unfair to expect everyone to vote on Election Day? There must be exceptions for those away from home or unable to appear at a polling place for health reasons. Absentee ballots have long been a feature of our voting system, but they must be mailed on time to prevent the gaming we witnessed in 2020. Having the resources to process all voters in one day might be challenging, so perhaps it’s not unreasonable to allow in-person voting over several days. I would also support a holiday for national elections.

Federalism Vs. Centralized Power

Again, it’s no secret that loosely controlled mail-in ballots are ripe for fraud. A drastic expansion of vote-by-mail facilitates efforts to harvest ballots and even manufacture votes. In 2020, deadlines for ballot delivery were extended indiscriminately. Signature verification was sidestepped. Ballots were shredded. Documented chains of custody were often lacking. Despite all that, even now there are many bills in state legislatures that would expand “voter access” in various ways. These are usually steps that would expose the public to more fraudulent elections and devaluation of legitimate votes.

But there is pushback: as of late February, there were 165 bills in 33 states designed to tighten election security, according to the Brennan Center for Justice:

“These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) slash voter registration opportunities; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges. These bills are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election.”

Conservative states can also resist federal efforts to control elections via nullification: arguably unconstitutional attempts by the federal government to regulate elections should not be recognized and enforced by states. Steve Baldwin asserts that the Tenth Amendment gives states the power to do so:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

There is, however, some ambiguity in Article I regarding the federal government‘s power to regulate elections. Despite the “secondary” nature of that federal power, it has certainly been invoked over the last 150 years, primarily in establishing voting rights previously denied on the basis of race and gender. H.R. 1 does not represent an unambiguous defense of voting rights of that kind, however. Instead, by facilitating fraud, it represents wholesale debasement of voting rights.

Let’s hope traditionally conservative states are aggressive in pressing their primary power to regulate elections on multiple fronts: legislative, nullification of federal overreach, as well as court challenges. And let’s hope H.R. 1 goes down to defeat in the Senate, but it will be tight.

Election Snafus, Fraud: Invite and They Will Come

12 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Democracy, Pandemic, Voter Fraud

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There is understandable controversy over the prospect of more mail-in voting, but it’s reasonable to believe that some additional mail-in or postal voting may be necessary in light of the pandemic. Social distancing reduces the volume of activity that polling places can handle in a single day, and administrative decisions about the voting process can’t be deferred until late October in order to observe the state of the pandemic and make last-minute changes. Most states already permit voters to request a mail-in ballot for a variety of reasons: travel, illness, or other exigencies are usually sufficient, if a reason is even required. In the context of the pandemic, such a request should certainly be granted to those most concerned about contracting the coronavirus. So the option to vote by mail seems reasonable, at least in the abstract, as long as those who prefer to cast their ballots in person can do so.

“Universal” mail-in voting is another story, but the term first requires some qualification. I construe “universal” in this case to mean voting by citizens of the United States, a right protected and reserved to citizens by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. That also means voters must be registered and must comply with state requirements for identification, if any, before receiving a ballot. In other words, under current state laws, a voter might be required to appear before an election authority to obtain a ballot for return by mail. The proponents of universal postal mail, however, seem to think states should simply mail ballots to the addresses of all registered voters. Many proponents go further, suggesting that all individuals of voting age should be mailed ballots.

The first major problem with a large expansion of postal voting is administrative complexity. It would represent a significant challenge for many jurisdictions to arrange in short order. It’s bound to create major delays in counting and reporting results, and it is likely to create doubt as to the reliability of the official election results. Here are some administrative issues and examples worth considering:

This recent experiment by CBS revealed delays in the official receipt of mailed ballots, a problem that will be more acute given plans in some jurisdictions to send ballots to postal voters only a week prior to the November election. The study also revealed some mis-sorting and misplacement of returned ballots. It concluded that a percentage of voters is likely to be “disenfranchised” by mail-in voting.

In early August, primary balloting by mail in Atlantic County, NJ was said to be especially problematic. Signatures on ballots were difficult to match to DMV records signed on “screen”; there was an extra step in delivering ballots to a central post office location and then on to election officials, causing delays; the voter registration system was plagued by technical glitches related to heavy demand for updated records; and there was insufficient time between sending ballots to voters and the deadline.

New York City’s primary election in June was similarly afflicted with a high rate of invalid mailed ballots. “The city BOE received 403,103 mail-in ballots for the June 23 Democratic presidential primary. … But the certified results released Wednesday revealed that only 318,995 mail-in ballots were counted. … That means 84,108 ballots were not counted or invalidated — 21 percent of the total. … One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects. The Post reported Tuesday that roughly 30,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in Brooklyn alone. … The high invalidation rate provides more proof that election officials and the Postal Service were woefully underprepared to handle and process the avalanche of mail-in ballots that voters were encouraged to fill out to avoid having to go to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic, critics said.”

From the New York Times, “In the last presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study [NYT link is bad] by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.”

The problem of rejected mail-in ballots is all too common throughout the country. For example, redistricting can cause mail-in voters to cast their votes in the wrong precinct at a higher rate; people move frequently, especially low-income voters, so updating voter rolls is a tremendous challenge; and voters often fail to follow instructions carefully, and there is no one at hand to offer assistance.

Again, these are just the administrative problems. The upshot is that mail-in voting is likely to introduce uncertainties and delays in determining election outcomes, and is likely to result in numerous legal challenges as well.

This piece by Eric Boehm in Reason is skeptical of our ability to vote by mail without major complications of that kind. Boehm then turns to the question of mail-in ballots and fraud, however, quoting a variety of experts who claim that election fraud is a miniscule problem and that fraud has not had a partisan bias in the past. But partisan bias is not really the critical issue… fraud is, party by party, district by district, and state by state.

Despite Boehm’s protestations and widespread denial in the news media, election fraud is a “thing”. More importantly, the risk of election fraud is a thing. It’s instructive that two U.S. Senators (Ron Wyden (OR) and Amy Klobuchar (MN)) have introduced legislation that not only would authorize more widespread voting by mail, but “ballot harvesting” as well. The latter is the practice of visiting homes and “offering” to collect residents’ postal ballots for delivery to collection points. It has been a flagrant form of vote fraud in the past.

So what is our experience with fraud? Here is a “sampling” of 1,290 cases of election fraud, many of which involved absentee ballots and ballot harvesting. Detail on most of these cases can be found here.

The following testimonial reinforces the ease with which fraud can be perpetrated via mail-in voting:”I know because I did it“:

“Last year, a political operative working for North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris was charged with fraud for directing a group of people to fill out as many as one thousand absentee ballot requests on behalf of voters — most of whom were unaware the ballots were being requested. … These people then collected the ballots and filled them out themselves. … 

Also in 2019, a Democratic city clerk in Southfield, Michigan, was arrested and charged with six felonies for falsifying absentee ballot records to say that 193 of the ballots in one election were missing signatures or a return date, when in fact they had both. The correct records were found in the trash can in her office.

… J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) says if states aren’t careful, they’ll be issuing ‘an open invitation to fraud. … There are two big problems with vote by mail,’ Adams told InsideSources. ‘Number one … people voting the ballot for other people through undue influence. … The second one — the voter rolls are a mess.’ … Adams’ organization has sued several states and counties for refusing to maintain accurate voter rolls, allowing the names of thousands of dead voters, felons and non-citizens to remain in the system.”

Fraud risk always exists even if detected and proven levels of fraud are low, and the level of risk scales with the extent to which ballots are cast by mail. The sudden, massive expansion in mail-in voting now contemplated by some would create unprecedented opportunities for fraud.

Consider the 28 million mail-in ballots that went missing between 2012 and 2018, roughly 20% of mail-in ballots issued during those years. According to Logan Churchwell of PILF:

“So what do people that really focus on the election process do about that? They go into ballot harvesting. If there’s so many ballots out there in the wind unaccounted for by election officials, surely some manpower could be dedicated to go bring them in. And that’s another part of the system where you have weaknesses and risk.”

It takes only a small percentage of the vote to swing many elections, so ballot harvesting, enabled by more widespread voting-by-mail, is a serious threat to the integrity of the democratic process. The last link cites a few reports that should give mail voting proponents some pause:

“There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud. A 2012 report in The New York Times noted that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots ‘is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say. In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time.’ According to a Wall Street Journal report on voter exploitation in Hispanic communities in Texas, mail-in ballots have ‘spawned a mini-industry of consultants who get out the absentee vote, sometimes using questionable techniques.’ Poor, elderly, and minority communities are most likely to be preyed upon by so-called ballot ‘brokers.’

Concerns about fraud in mail-in ballots were serious enough that a 2008 report produced by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project recommended that states ‘restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting.'”

It’s no coincidence that most countries in the European Union restrict mail-in voting to those who are unable to vote in-person, such as those working or studying abroad, as well as the sick and elderly. There are exceptions, of course, but many of these developed countries reject the notion that mail-in voting is worth the risks.

It’s reasonable to expect many cautious voters to request ballots for return by mail. But at a minimum, any large-scale transition to postal voting should be done with care for the security and integrity of the voting process. It is not an exercise to be done in haste, as proponents now demand. The result of such a drastic change would be significant delays, legal challenges, and reduced confidence in the outcome of elections. And there will almost certainly be fraud. As in almost all things, a voluntary option subject to jurisdictional risk controls is far preferable to either mandatory or “universal” postal voting.