“Absentee ballots remain the
largest source of potential voter fraud.” That quote isn’t from President
Trump, who criticized mail-in voting this week after Wisconsin Democrats tried
and failed to change an election at the last minute into an exclusively mail-in
affair. It’s the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on
Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former
Secretary of State James Baker III.
Concerns about vote-buying have a
long history in the U.S. They helped drive the move to the secret ballot, which
U.S. states adopted between 1888 and 1950. Secret ballots made it harder for
vote buyers to monitor which candidates sellers actually voted for. Vote-buying
had been pervasive; my research with Larry Kenny at the University of Florida
has found that voter turnout fell by about 8% to 12% after states adopted the
secret ballot.
You wouldn’t know any of this
listening to the media outcry over Mr. Trump’s remarks. “There is a lot of
dishonesty going on with mail-in voting,” the president said Tuesday. In
response, a CNN “fact check” declares that Mr. Trump “opened a new front in his
campaign of lies about voter fraud.” A New York Times headline asserts: “Trump
Is Pushing a False Argument on Vote-by-Mail Fraud.” Both claim that voter fraud
is essentially nonexistent. The Carter-Baker report found otherwise.
Intimidation and vote buying were
key concerns of the commission: “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes,
at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and
subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to
detect when citizens vote by mail.” The report provides examples, such as the
1997 Miami mayoral election that resulted in 36 arrests for absentee-ballot
fraud. The election had to be rerun, and the result was reversed.
There are more recent cases, too.
In 2017 an investigation of a Dallas City Council election found some 700
fraudulent mail-in ballots signed by the same witness using a fake name. The
discovery left two council races in limbo, and the fraud was much larger than
the vote differential in one of those races. The case resulted in a criminal
conviction. . . .
It is often claimed that impossibly
large numbers of people live at the same address. In 2016, 83 registered voters
in San Pedro, Calif., received absentee ballots at the same small two-bedroom
apartment. Prosecutors rarely pursue this type of case.
Mail-in voting is a throwback to
the dark old days of vote-buying and fraud. Because of this, many countries
don’t allow absentee ballots for citizens living in their country, including
Norway and Mexico. Americans deserve a more trustworthy system.
The above extract is via Instapundit; the original article
in the WSJ is behind a paywall.
And here’s an article by a reporter who demonstrated how
easy it is to game the system: “Mail-in Ballots Make Voter Fraud Easy. I Know Because I Did It”.
Ohio voters had their Election Day cancelled, and voters had
nothing to say about it. The most recent Cleveland Tea Party blog on this is
here.
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