FBI director Kash Patel recently sent an intelligence report to Senate Judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley.  According to an article by John Solomon of Just the News, the report states that a confidential human source told the FBI that China’s Communist government

was shipping fake driver’s licenses to the United States to manufacture “tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in votes” for Joe Biden[.]

Mail-in ballots are dangerously vulnerable to interference.  Their very presence in large numbers is a threat to election integrity.  Apparently, even officials in China know this.  To understand why mail-in ballots are vulnerable, it helps to understand the steps each mail-in ballot goes through.

The processes for voting by mail vary by state.  In most states, the voter applies for a mail-in ballot and may or may not need to provide a reason such as disability, illness, or being overseas in the military.  In others, the government automatically sends mail-in ballots to everyone.  (Bad idea.  Really, really bad idea.)  There are different deadlines for receipt of the mail-in ballot application and the completed ballot, as well as different procedures for processing the completed ballot once it arrives.

Knowing that there are variations, here is the basic process:

The voter requests the mail-in ballot.  This is, with the exceptions of CA, CO, HI, NV, OR, UT, VT, and WA, where mail-in ballots are sent to everyone.  Deadlines may be based on the date of the postmark or of receipt and whether the request is made by mail, online, or in-person.

Upon receipt of the application, election officials check identifying information such as name, address, and signature against the voter’s file in the registered voter database.

Officials mail a ballot to the voter once the identifying information is validated.

The voter completes the ballot with desired candidates or issues.

The voter must include identifying information.  In most states, the mail-in ballot must include the voter’s name, address, date of birth and/or a signature.  In some states, the voter must include the signature of a witness.

The voter must properly return the completed packet.  For privacy reasons, the process for returning mail-in ballots can include multiple steps.  For example, in Minnesota in 2020, there were three envelopes involved:

The completed ballot goes into the smallest envelope.  To ensure a confidential vote, there is no identifying information on this envelope.  So

the smallest envelope goes into the middle envelope, known as the signature envelope, which has a place for identifying information.  Then

the middle envelope goes into the largest envelope, the mailing envelope.  There is no personal information on this envelope.

The voter returns the ballot via mail, via drop-box, or in person.  Again, deadlines can vary.

The election office processes the ballot.  There are multiple steps to verify the identifying information, store the ballot and count it.  Again, using Minnesota as an example,

The return envelope is stamped with the date of receipt.

The envelopes are kept in a locked room until delivery to the ballot board.

Members of the ballot board examine the signature envelope to ensure that the information matches the voter’s mail-in ballot application or their record in the registered voter database.

If the identifying information is accurate, the signature envelope is marked “accepted.”

On a specified date, the ballots are removed from the signature envelope and placed in a ballot box.

The ballots are sealed and secured. 

The ballot is counted.  After the polls have closed, members of the ballot board count the ballots.

Locked rooms, verifications, date stamps — doesn’t this all sound good?  Isn’t this proof of excellent safeguards?  No, it is not.

The large number of steps involved in mail-in voting is an inherent part of the problem.  This list, including the sub-items, totals 18 steps between the voter requesting a mail-in ballot and that ballot being cast.  That’s 18 steps that can go wrong, 18 steps that are vulnerable to interference, and 18 steps that that can invalidate a vote.

Furthermore, this list doesn’t even include the processes that occur if a ballot is rejected, won’t go through a scanner or has another type of error.  If you want to make yourself go cross-eyed, try reading the mail-in voting statutes of almost any state.

Voting by mail-in ballot also increases the number of people who handle a voter’s application and completed ballot after they have left the voter’s hands.  This includes people who

validate the information on the application,

mail and deliver the blank absentee ballot,

deliver the completed ballot,

receive and date-stamp the ballot,

open the outer envelope and remove the signature envelope,

validate the identifying information on the signature envelope,

sort and put each envelope in the right bin,

secure the signature envelopes in a locked room,

maintain proper chain-of-custody practices and documentation,

retrieve the envelopes from the locked room,

open the signature envelope to take out the smallest envelope,

open the smallest envelope to take out the actual ballot, and

process the ballots through any scanners or machines.

In contrast to all of that, an in-person voter has the following steps:

Go to the polling location with identification.

Show identification to the volunteers.

Volunteers will match the identification with the voter registration list.

Go to the voting booth.

Vote.

The number of people who handle an in-person voter’s completed ballot before it is cast is — zero.  None.  Absolutely no person at all.  This is absolutely, positively the best way to secure the integrity of any American’s vote.

It is also one of the best ways to secure the integrity of our elections. People who are truly unable to go to the polls and need to vote absentee represent a very small percentage of voters and therefore a very small absolute number of absentee ballots.  This small number of absentee ballots makes it difficult for any ballot-tampering to swing the results of an election, because there simply aren’t enough of them.

The opposite was true in 2020.  According to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Election Data Science Lab, in 2018, mail-in ballots constituted about 22% of votes in America.  In 2020, with COVID, it doubled to above 45%.

There were 154.6 million votes cast in 2020, which means 69.6 million of them were mail-in ballots.  That is a tremendous number of ballots to be processed outside the voters’ hands, go through those 18 steps, and be handled by multiple volunteers and officials before they are cast.

The vast majority of election officials, judges, staff, and volunteers are honest people who want the finest election process, but it takes only a few dishonest actors in a battleground state, county, city, or town to alter the results of an election.

America must go back to requiring a legitimate reason to vote absentee.  The inherent structure of the mail-in ballot process makes it a veritable playground for those dishonest actors who want to commit election interference.

Image: Ben Schumin via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Source link