Unfortunately, since the most recent (primary) election in Ohio relied on mail-in ballots, there is now precedence. This report by Joseph Klein at Front Page Magazine provides useful talking points in the event that the Secretary of State decides to try to lock in mail-ballots for the November 2020 election.
. . .
So why did President Trump bring up
the possibility of election delay in his tweet (with four question marks) in
the first place? The reason was to call attention to the dangers of universal
mail-in voting that threaten the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
There is a real potential for fraud, to be sure. But even in the absence of
widespread fraud, universal mail-in voting faces significant challenges in
ensuring a fair election result, starting with its reliance on the all too
unreliable U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Moreover, states’ broad authority in the
administration of elections in which their citizens vote, including federal
elections, does not mean they can throw caution to the wind and dilute the
voting power of clearly qualified voters. This will most certainly happen when
states introducing universal mail-in voting for the first time in a
presidential general election do so without robust safeguards to ensure the
integrity of the mail-in process. There is too little time to devise and
implement anything close to the safeguards that presently exist for in-person
voting and the more limited use of absentee ballots as the exception rather
than the rule. There are a few smaller states that have used all or majority
mail-in voting for years with safeguards that have proven workable. However,
such safeguards cannot simply be transplanted into the systems of larger states
overnight.
The U.S.
Postal Service has proven its inability to handle properly the huge
anticipated volume of mail-in ballots in a timely and uniform fashion across
the United States. As a Democratic commissioner and co-chair of the New York
State Board of Elections said: “One of the big problems of going to a vote by
mail system is that the Boards of Elections are now in partnership with the
U.S. Postal Service for conducting the election.” We are still awaiting the
final results in a few contests from this past June’s Democratic primary in New
York where there was significant reliance on mail-in voting.
. . .
In Ohio, there was evidently an “unintentional
mis-sort” of more than 300 ballots, according to the U.S. Postal Service’s
chief operating officer, which caused them to be delivered too late to be
counted by a county Board of Elections. “An unintentional mis-sort of a tray of
Butler County return ballots ultimately contributed to a gap in the mail flow,
resulting in the delay,” he said, which he identified as “an opportunity for
improvement.”
. . .
The examples of post office related
problems with mail-in voting described above, as well as breakdowns in other
states, occurred before the July 10, 2020 implementation date for the new
Postmaster General's changes. We are talking about a record of sheer
incompetence that, when replicated on a far larger scale in connection with
this year’s general election, could well affect the final results in swing
states such as Ohio and Wisconsin.
Read the entire report here.
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