by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky
Many states have already begun sending out absentee ballots for the November election.
At a time when so many people are choosing to vote by mail, two leading national organizations of election officials he wrote The United States Postal Service is demanding immediate action to avoid confusion and chaos associated with mail-in voting.
“We call for immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues at the USPS,” the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State wrote. “Failure to do so risks undermining voter participation and trust in the election process.” According to According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, 43% of the electorate voted by mail in 2020, an raise of 20 percentage points from 2016.
The list of issues in the letter should be alarming to anyone thinking about voting by mail instead of going to a polling place in person. This includes USPS employees across the country who are “not informed of USPS’s election mail policies,” resulting in “significantly delayed or otherwise improperly processed” mail-in votes. “On-time postmarked ballots” are being received “10 or more days after postmark,” showing that the USPS is “unable to meet its own service delivery deadlines.”
This letter is a continuation of the letter from July report from the USPS inspector general, who warned that his audit of primaries in 13 states found that 2.99% of mail-in ballots arrived delayed to voters and 1.83% were returned to election offices after statutory deadlines. His list of horror stories included the discovery that “local management at one facility said they were unaware that this week was a primary election day.”
This means that almost 5% of voters were disenfranchised, which on a national scale means hundreds of thousands of votes.
There are reports of other nightmares. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab is ‘very concerned’ that 2% of votes in August primary sent Mailed items were not counted “due to USPS administrative negligence.”
“Pony Express is more efficient at this point” he said Swabian.
In July, Utah held its Republican Party congressional primary elections, with the state’s margin There were 176 votes. But almost 1,200 votes cast by correspondence were not counted Because were first sent to a distribution center in Las Vegas and were not postmarked in time. Most of those votes were in a county where the candidate who ultimately lost voted by a two-to-one margin.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation is suing Nevada officials for failing to correct obvious errors in voter rolls. The organization found hundreds of questionable voter addresses, including strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, gas stations and fast-food restaurants. “Nevada’s policy of automatically sending a ballot to every active registered voter compels election officials to have accurate voter rolls and not send ballots to addresses where no one lives.” – PILF notes.
BALL steering that the 2022 U.S. Senate race in Nevada was decided by 7,928 votes, clinching party control of the body. Secretary of State PILF noted, “released data showing that 95,556 votes were sent to undeliverable or ‘wrong’ addresses, and another 8,036 were rejected after receipt.” Also, “Another 1.2 million votes were never returned to clerks for counting.”
This year, there is another Senate majority race underway in Nevada that could decide the outcome.
Across the country, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reports that of the nearly 91 million mail-in ballots sent to voters across all states in 2020, only 70 million were returned.
What happened to the others? Some were not filled out. But other filled-out ballots were likely lost in increasingly unskilled mail. And election officials complained in a letter to the USPS that election mail “sent to voters” was being returned as “undeliverable” with “higher than usual frequency.” Some voters who were registered more than once received more than one ballot.
At least 1.1 million went to invalid addresses. Some may have gone to vacant lots and businesses. About 500,000 were rejected by election officials when they were returned, often because of voter errors that could have been corrected by election officials if voters had cast their ballots in person.
Registration rolls are notoriously full of ineligible, duplicate, fictitious, and deceased voters, a fact that is easily exploited to commit fraud. Mail-in votes can become subject to intimidation and vote-buying schemes.
In 2005, the bipartisan Federal Election Reform Commission, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, pointed that “mail-in voting remains the single largest source of potential voter fraud.” Even the New York Times he admitted in 2012, it was found that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be rigged, and more likely to be challenged than votes cast in the polling booth.”
Not much has changed. In 2019, North Carolina held a congressional race thrown because of mail-in votes collected through illegal vote trading. Judge ordered novel election in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, mayoral race last year after a video emerged of two women dropping a suspiciously huge number of absentee ballots into ballot boxes.
In New York this month, three Rensselaer County officials went on trial accused of mail-in ballot fraud. A former GOP elections commissioner who has already pleaded guilty he testified that looser postal procedures following the COVID-19 pandemic make it much easier to commit election fraud.
Before Election Day, Postal Service officials must address delays and mishandling of mail-in ballots. Lax U.S. election laws that address everything from third-party vote-trading to lax or nonexistent ID laws in many states make it necessary to have election observers on hand to observe every aspect of the voting and tabulation process.
And after weeks of lawsuits and vote-counting delays that the flood of mail-in ballots will undoubtedly cause, we should heed the advice of those who disparage in-person voting and assure us that “the votes were mailed in.”
After all, if you won the lottery, would you mail your ticket or show up in person to collect the jackpot?
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Hans von Spakovsky and Thomas Jipping are senior fellows at the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
John Fund is a national affairs reporter at National Review.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Casting Votes into the Ballot Box” by L’beaumont.CC BY-SA 4.0.
