There’s been an ongoing debate about increasing the use of mail-in balloting during the continuing COVID pandemic. The thinking goes, why not reduce in-person voting, or even eliminate it altogether, and just have people vote by mail. Then we won’t have to risk standing in line and contracting the virus when we’re at the polling place.
President Trump has been quite vocal in his opposition to mass mail-in voting, claiming that it would lead to a dramatic increase in voter fraud. Whenever he says this, the mainstream press is quick to add their two cents – usually stating that President Trump is wrong, and that there’s no increased risk of fraud.
So who’s right? Well here are my two cents.
You have to differentiate between mass, or universal, use of mail-in balloting, and absentee ballot voting. In Ohio, for example, we’ve had absentee balloting, without the need to come up with an excuse or justification for voting absentee, for years now. And it works very well.
Ohio’s Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, recently sent out a “request for absentee ballot” form, to every registered voter in the state (you probably got one.) If you decide to vote absentee by mail, you fill out this request form, send it in, and you’ll receive an absentee ballot back in the mail. You then use that absentee ballot to vote by filling it out, and mailing it in – no problem.
Here’s where the problem comes in, and what President Trump is talking about, when he warns of potentially more fraud. Some states, California for example, send the actual ballot out to every registered voter (and some who are not registered) even though no one has asked for it. Essentially, California puts millions of blank ballots into circulation, and it’s Katy-bar-the-door for fraud. Democrats in California have mastered the practice of “vote harvesting” or “ballot harvesting” whereby campaign operatives collect these blank ballots in bulk, and somebody, God only knows who, votes them, and turns them in, in mass.
In the last Congressional election, 2018, Republicans were ahead in a half-dozen congressional races in California on election night. Over several weeks, as the “harvested” ballots kept coming in and were counted (almost all these votes going to Democrats) every single one of these Republican candidates, who were ahead on election night, lost. Talk about undermining confidence in our electoral system – at least in California.
Democrats want to replicate that mass distribution of blank ballots being sent out, all across the country, in every state. In my opinion, that would be a disaster, and that’s what President Trump is talking about.
The mainstream press almost never clarifies this. They simply say Trump is lying. And that there’s no increased risk of fraud by the use of mail-in voting.
That may be true relative to absentee voting, as currently practiced in Ohio. But that is most assuredly not the case if we would follow the California model, and just mail out ballots to everyone, and let a political party collect them, vote them, and send them in to be counted – and decide the election.
We cannot let that happen.