A review of the very sudden and widespread expansion of mail-in voting around the country ahead of the 2020 election by the America First Policy Institute warns that mass balloting by mail is replete with additional risks for fraud and additional problems, while also urging for new rules to make voting that way much more secure.
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At first, mail-in ballots were only for “military members away from home and other individuals who were legitimately unable to vote in person on Election Day because of disability or travel,” the right-leaning think tank reported in an August study titled, “The Case Against Mass-Mail In Ballots.”
But since the year 2000 when Oregon became the first state to begin using so-called ‘no-excuse’ absentee ballots, 29 other states and the District of Columbia have done so as well.
“More states adopted these measures during the 2020 Election Cycle, and now only Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Indiana require an excuse to request a mail-in ballot,” according to the report.
“Shockingly,” the report notes further, “there is now a widespread effort to make no-excuse absentee ballot measures permanent across all elections.”
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Just the News adds:
Typically, absentee ballot rules require voters to request ballots and provide identification before they are sent out, AFPI explained. Then, after the clerk’s office verifies a voter’s identity, the voter will receive a ballot that can either be mailed in or returned in person at a designated polling location.
But with universal mail-in voting, all registered voters are sent absentee ballots regardless of whether they requested them.
Eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — have made universal mail-in voting permanent.
After widespread mail-in ballots were implemented last year on account of the COVID-19 pandemic, cities and counties installed drop boxes for voters to deposit their ballots, but did so “oftentimes with no security or chain of custody to show their security,” the report said.
“This removed any obstacles from ballots being illegally trafficked,” the study found, citing a Vision Times story which noted the lack of “chain of custody documents for thousands of mail absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes and transferred to counting locations” in Georgia.
Sometimes, “the security of these ballots was so negligent that ballot drop boxes were sometimes vandalized and torched,” the report added, referencing an NBC 10 Boston news article about a ballot drop box that was set ablaze.
In addition, last year’s election also elicited several complaints about the distribution of drop boxes — namely, that they were placed in biased, unequal, and politically motivated ways.
“In Democrat Delaware County, Pennsylvania, one drop box was placed every four square miles and for every 4,000 voters,” reported The Amistad Project. By comparison, according to election integrity watchdog, “In the 59 counties carried by Trump in 2016, there was one drop box for every 1,100 square miles and every 72,000 voters.”
Worsening the problems associated with mass mail-in balloting are outdated, inaccurate voter registration rolls, the AFPI report said, leading to at least one instance where thousands of people were sent ballots from two states, in addition to several instances in which votes of dead people were cast.
Citing the need for better protections and universal standards “to instill greater security in the process” of mail-in voting, the AFPI report made a series of recommendations, to include, per Just the News:
h/t: Conservative Brief
