Don’t Tell Us There’s Nothing to Worry About

On September 24^th, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress on mail-in voting. He assured the committee that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud and that, historically, the FBI has not seen “any kind of national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.” 

Do you feel better now?

You shouldn’t. 

Who says you should be worried about voter fraud impacting the election? (I know, I know, President Trump says it all the time, but hear me out). How about simple incompetence? Like, you know, 1,666 uncounted ballots from a New Jersey primary conducted in July being found in September because they were put in a “mislabeled” bin in the local board of elections office? 500 North Carolina voters who received two absentee ballots in the mail? Thousands of ballots for June 2^nd primaries in Pennsylvania that were invalidated because they didn’t arrive on time; many voters never received ballots and had to cast provisional ballots at the polls? A half a million absentee ballot applications mailed in Virginia with incorrect voter information to dead people, people who no longer live in the state and a pet? 

That last example highlights the most significant problem facing states which are conducting the upcoming election via mail-in ballots. The absentee voter applications were mailed by a third party, not the state-but that third party used Virginia’s registered voter database to compile its mailing list. In Nevada in a June primary 233,000 ballots were sent to outdated addresses. Apparently, there are a few states, like Oregon and Washington, which have had mail-in voting for years and are diligent about updating their voter rolls. Nevada is not one of those states.

Neither is California. The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch has sent letters to 19 counties in the country threatening to sue them if they don’t clean up their voter rolls; 11 of those counties are in California. Last year Los Angeles County settled a lawsuit after it was discovered it had 1.6 million more registered voters than the total eligible voter population in the county. In reaction to that suit, San Diego County deleted 500,000 voter registrations from its rolls. And STILL has a registration rate of 117% of the eligible voter population. 

And how about The Public Interest Legal Foundation? That group has found that there are 349,773 deceased people registered to vote in 41 states.

You don’t have speculate what can happen in mail-in voting elections conducted by states with no experience running such elections on the scale presently planned. Take a look at New York. 

On June 23^rd, New York conducted its primaries for state and federal offices. Voters were urged by Governor Cuomo to vote via mail-in ballots because of the Wuhan virus. One month after the primaries, three congressional races and several state senate and assembly races were still undecided. A federal lawsuit was filed which revealed that 30,000 ballots of the 120,000 ballots cast in Brooklyn were invalidated. The reasons ballots were disqualified included the lack of voter signatures and postmarks or late arrival at the Board of Elections (BOE).  It turns out that due to the kindness of Governor Cuomo and the wallets of New York taxpayers, the state sent prepaid return envelopes for voters to use. This became a problem when Post Office processing centers in Brooklyn did not postmark the envelopes-although the Post Office did postmark the envelopes in other boroughs. Also, ballots were late due to delivery delays by both the Post Office and the BOE and because many voters did not receive the ballots until Election Day.

A total of 403,103 ballots were mailed in for the Democratic primary in New York City. 84,108 were not counted or invalidated. That’s 21% (don’t Democrats like to say that President Trump only won in 2016 because he received 80,000 more votes than Hillary in three states?).

In one of the most prominent primaries, that of Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York’s 12^th Congressional District, the results were not certified until August 5^th, six weeks after the primary. 

So, you can add your right to vote to the Wuhan virus casualty list. You know, like your right to practice your religion and your right to assemble. Of course, Al Sharpton gets to go to George Floyd’s funeral, governors participate in protests against systemic racism in violation of their own executive orders and a rally for black transgenders is held at the Brooklyn Museum without Mayor DeBlasio or Governor Cuomo threatening attendees (see here). Maybe our right to vote hasn’t been taken away, but based on the results of mail-in voting across the country in the last few months, it certainly has the potential to be severely infringed. Absentee ballots have been used since the Civil War. However, a voter has to request an absentee ballot and give their present address. A mail-in voting election, which has been mandated in New Jersey, requires the states/counties to mail ballots to voters based on their voter rolls. As we can see, that is an ongoing problem across the country and has been for years. 

For people who want to vote by mail, or the elderly or other people with health issues, who we now know are susceptible to the virus and should vote by mail, there was already a mechanism in place-absentee ballots. But for those of us who would have preferred voting in person, why couldn’t states extend the election over two or three days so polls wouldn’t get too crowded and people could socially distance (in their masks, of course)? People are voting in person today in New York, Governor Murphy. Why not New Jersey?

The election is not going to be decided on November 3^rd. The question is, how long will it take for the mailed in ballots to be counted? The next question is, who is going to file more lawsuits contesting election results, Democrats or Republicans? Finally, who wants to bet that the antifa crowd will sit quietly for however long this takes and gracefully accept whatever the election results are?

UPDATE: OCTOBER 31, 2020

And so it begins….