By Nancy Thorner -
At its core, people cheat in elections to further their preferred causes or to advance their own careers.
Unfortunately, unless it’s a Republican committing the fraud, many liberal politicians and activists routinely insist that voter fraud is a figment of conservatives’ imaginations—or they assert that it’s so rare it’s inconsequential.
"Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That quote isn’t from President Trump, who criticized mail-in voting after Wisconsin Democrats tried and failed to change an election at the last minute into an exclusively mail-in affair.
It’s also 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.
Fraud, not a figment of imagination
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.
Across the nation, hundreds of counties have more registered voters than residents. In June of 2019 California began a process of removing a staggering 5 million inactive registrations from its rolls, but only after it was sued by Judicial Watch.
Impossible to deny is that individuals are exploiting vulnerabilities in the election process. The Heritage voter fraud database contains 1,217 proven instances of fraud. That list isn’t even a comprehensive one.
These 1,217 cases, most likely only the tip of the iceberg, range from ineligible noncitizens casting illegal ballots to corrupt politicians buying votes and rigging their own elections.
Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.
States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots since they were mailed – and the figure of 28 million missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency’s survey questions. This figure does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.
Although there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which compiled the public data provided from the Election Assistance Commission, says that the sheer volume of them raises serious doubts about election security.
Coronavirus a force to change how we vote?
During the coronavirus, with its extraordinary upending of our regular life, some want to use this crisis to permanently change how we vote in this country. We are reminded of the left’s slogan, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
According to The Daily Caller, a growing chorus of Democrats are demanding that the entire U.S. vote by mail in November because of the coronavirus pandemic. Election experts say this could open the door to rampant fraud and mismanagement. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, including the President Trump, stands largely against such a measure.
President Trump is right to be worried about elections conducted entirely by mail. As the president said in a tweet, we do need absentee ballots for “many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is looking at a future round of coronavirus response legislation to fund Democrats’ plan to force Americans to accept mail-it-in elections. As Pelosi said in an interview on MSNBC, “much more than” $400 million will be in the next bill so that “every person registered to vote” will receive a ballot at home.
Experts, however, are warning that a mail-in voting system called for by Nancy Pelosi for the November elections would be massively susceptible to fraud.
As Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, told the Daily Caller News Foundation:
“Voter registration rolls are in notoriously bad shape all over the country. State governments typically do a poor job of cleaning up their voter rolls by properly taking off names of people who have moved or died."
“By simply mailing every voter a ballot on the voter list, you will ultimately have a large number of people receiving ballots that aren’t theirs. One of the main reasons is the ballots are voted on outside of the supervision of election officials meaning a grandson can fill out the grandmother’s ballot.”
All-mail jurisdictions such as Oregon like to brag about the supposed “security” of their systems, which consists of almost nothing other than a rapid, superficial signature comparison.
As Melody Rose, an assistant professor of political science at Portland State University, told the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t have much faith in that process. I can forge my husband’s signature perfectly."
Rose conducted a survey of one county, Washington County, outside Portland. Five percent of registered voters admitted that other people marked their ballots, and 2.4% said someone else signed their ballots.
Rose suspected the actual number was higher, given that most people would not want to admit to being “party to a crime.” That would mean that tens of thousands of mail-in ballots are being cast in Oregon by individuals other than the registered voter.
Is it any wonder that absentee ballots are the tools of choice of election fraudsters because they are voted outside the supervision of election officials, making it easier to steal, forge, or alter them, as well as to intimidate voters.
Conclusion
As we face the critical election this year, 2020, we do well to stay on guard against any means from anybody to steal our vote. Veteran journalist Bob Knight has written stellar book, Liberty on the Brink, on the left’s efforts to falsify elections.
In his book Mr. Knight presents an example of one of the latest techniques the left is using to steal elections that is rife with potential voter fraud, ballot harvesting. Where it is legal, people can go out and collect ballots from people you're not related to.
As Knight pointed out, on election night 2018, in normally conservative Orange County, California, several Republicans were leading—one of them by 14%. And then, said Knight: “Thousands of ballots came in [later] that were harvested by volunteers, usually union leaders. That swept the Democrats to power in all congressional districts in Orange County and the county overnight became a Democratic county.
