Vote by Mail in 2020
Vote by mail
Our
discussion is in regard to this article from cnet.com:
The author,
Alfred Ng, begins with his opinion as the title. Unless you think it through, you’ll assume he’s
put a factual title on his opinion piece.
Don’t be fooled.
[Text from the article is in yellow]
The threat to vote by mail isn't fraud. It's
disinformation and sabotage
Election officials say it's
nearly impossible to commit voter fraud by mail. Getting people to doubt the
legitimacy of the whole process is much easier.
Millions
of Americans have voted by mail securely for more than 150
years, with fraud historically being so rare that election officials wouldn't
even consider it significant enough to be a rounding error. But with the coronavirus pandemic pushing a record number of absentee
ballot requests, President Donald Trump and his administration have
attacked the time-tested system, claiming that it will lead to a chaotic
Election Day outcome.
The last sentence in the
above paragraph is false. The President
and his staff have not attacked the ‘time-tested system’. They have attacked the plans of some states
to mail ballots to every registered voter, not those who request an absentee
ballot. Those are two different systems
of gathering votes, one of which has been and will continue to be used, while
the new idea of governors like Phil Murphy of New Jersey (my home state) is to
mail a ballot to every registered voter in the state.
Since April, Trump has questioned the legitimacy of vote-by-mail on Twitter, saying it will "lead to massive corruption and fraud," without offering any evidence of what security flaws are present. Attorney General William Barr also claimed, in June, that voting by mail "opens the floodgates to fraud," also without any proof.
My
red highlights are also untruths the author states. Check out this article:
Trump Campaign Sues New Jersey Over Hybrid
Voting Model for 2020 Election
New Jersey’s governor signed an executive
order allowing residents to mail in a ballot or vote in person in the election.
Trump’s
legal challenge offers the proof the writer of this article needs. Since he’s a journalist, I won’t assume he
didn’t see the US News article. It’s his
job to look things up. I am taking an
hour of my time to do this and I already have poked holes in his work…
In
Minnesota alone, the number of requests for mail-in ballots has risen more than
16 times, to roughly 470,000, according to Steve Simon, Minnesota's secretary
of state, who doesn't buy into the concerns raised by the president.
"It
would be almost impossible to pull off voter fraud on a scale that would be
required to tip the balance," Simon said. "We have vanishingly rare
cases of voter misconduct. The security precautions in place have stood the
test of time."
Nice quote from Democrat… maybe he’s biased against the President…
Mr. Ng spends most of the rest of his ‘article’ explaining how it
would be impossible to vote fraudulently WITH ABSENTEE BALLOTS. He completely ignores the issue of states
like New Jersey and Arizona and Minnesota that want to expand voting by sending
out millions of ballots.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy issued an executive order allowing residents to mail in a ballot or vote in person for the election due to the coronavirus pandemic. The order calls on officials to mail all registered voters in the state a ballot beginning Oct. 5 along with a prepaid return envelope.
The above is a
screen capture from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_New_Jersey_gubernatorial_election
Total votes
cast: 2,147,415
Turnout: 38.5%
Total
registered voters: 5,461,540
Unused ballots: 3,314,125
Question: What happens to the 61.5% of the ballots that
are mailed but not used by the voters?
Let’s assume
that because of COVID, Mail-in voting, a presidential election, and many other
reasons, that 50% of the electorate mail in their ballots. That leaves 2,730,770 ballots in the hands of…
who?
I have worked
at several jobs in the last 20 years.
One of which was a floor measure technician for a branch of Home
Depot. I spent almost 6 years visiting
about 12 homes a day all over North New Jersey.
Ranches, suburbs, urban apartments, public housing… you name it, I’ve
seen it. I measured almost 12,000 homes in
that time. Based on my observations of
how mail is delivered, there would be no problem with traveling around to
apartments in heavily populated neighborhoods and gathering up thousands of
ballots. I could then vote them, sign
them, and mail them. So they catch
half. I’ve still managed to vote 10,000
times for Trump.
If it’s that
easy for me to think of this, how hard will it be for political activists who
spent all day on election day driving around the state gathering up people and
taking them to vote?
You may not
like it, and you can doubt the feasibility, but that’s my math and that’s why I
don’t want ballots mailed out to every registered voter.
BTW, I worked
at the elections department in Siskiyou County, California in 1996, so I do have
some experience. And the state of voting
in most places would be overwhelmed by vote by mail.
Finally, I found this article from fivethirtyeight.com, a left
leaning site, which seems pretty honest, and also states that fraud is rare…
but it’s always rare until it isn’t, and I don’t trust politicians who believe
killing unborn children is a right.
posted by James P. Shaw at 6:17 PM
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