By John F. Di Leo -
The question of the year is, how should we manage our elections?
Perhaps this should actually be the question every year, as study after study, and numerous convictions – all over the country – have proven that vote fraud is real and widespread, not just some localized Chicago problem or political red herring.
But with pandemic-related calls for sweeping changes in our voting methods this year, with an effort to rush them through without so much as a chance for analysis and discussion, we risk turning our elections from merely imperfect to worse than useless.
The Issue of the Day
Let’s begin by stating the alleged justification for a change: Due to fear of the CCP Virus (or COVID-19, or Wuhan Flu, or whatever you want to call it), state and local governments across the country have pushed a wide variety of statutes, recommendations, and government office redesigns. They have mandated the wearing of masks, scarves or bandanas, mandated one-way arrows for supermarket aisles, closed the doors of restaurants, theaters and nightclubs, put thousands of stores and hotels out of business, and put millions of people out of work. All ostensibly to protect people from this virus.
The Left now proposes that we close down our polling places too, just as we have shut down half the economy. Don’t hold a real election at all, they say; just do it by mail, as we do with Publisher’s Clearing House, and national party surveys, and birthday cards and car dealer brochures. Flood the mailboxes with ballots, let people return them at their leisure, and hope they show up in time to be counted.
But before we go into the plethora of problems with that proposal, why not ask whether it’s even necessary?
· Virtually all serious analysts admit that the virus is mutating downward; new infections don’t compare with the severity and even occasionally fatal illness that hit America earlier in the year.
· Unlike a department store where one might spend half an hour or more, or a restaurant where one might spend over an hour, people are only in a polling place five to fifteen minutes, on average, in most states. The exposure to other people is far less than in the WalMarts and grocery stores that we have allowed to stay open, and it’s just a once-or-twice-per-year visit, not a daily or weekly excursion.
· If staying six feet away from others, and wearing masks or bandanas, is considered an acceptable precaution everywhere else, why not at polling places? Pollworkers have always set up the voting booths several feet apart anyway, for privacy; it would be no trouble at all to add a couple more feet to that. Instead of three or four feet apart, make it six feet apart. Heck, polling places are often in school cafeterias and gyms, there’s all the room in the world. We could put voters ten feet apart in most venues and not run out of room.
Frankly, there is no good reason to deviate from the traditional election approach – and there are plenty of reasons to stick with it. Information comes out about candidates constantly throughout an election season, with every candidate, and every party, timing their news releases, policy statements, advertising and human outreach to make the most of the entire season. People who make up their mind weeks or months beforehand often find that they made their decision based on incomplete data, as they discover late in the season some new dealbreaker or other gamechanger; if they had cast their vote before discovering it, they would have to live with that error.
So let's consider how voting is done – or at least, the optimal way it's done, before we start compromising for various reasons, both good and bad.
The vote is a special privilege; at the time of our nation's founding, the ability of the people to vote for their leaders was almost unknown around the world. There were small republics, here and there, but the majority of major countries were monarchies, where governmental leaders were hereditary or appointed, not chosen by the people.
We Americans have tried, through careful expansion of the franchise, to approach the point at which our government is chosen by as many adult American citizens as desire to participate. Most states understandably excluded felons, until recently, but other than that, all men and women, young and old, above 18, whether native born or naturalized could participate in our elections.
It took a long time and a lot of work to get to this point… 19th century Republicans had to fight a civil war and pass Constitutional amendments to get the Democrats to relent and allow black Americans to be free and to vote; later Republican women like Susan B Anthony and Henrietta Wells Livermore then fought to further expand the franchise to women.
So today, our goal is quite broad – all non-felon US citizens over 18, period, deserve to vote – once per election.
To be sure of this, we have traditionally required voter registration in advance, demonstrating both US citizenship and proof of residence in the town claimed, so that people vote only once, and are able to select their representatives, not the representatives for some other neighborhood.
Holding our election on a single day protects us against some voters having more information to inform their decision than other voters, and requiring pre-registration reduces the chances of such corruption as people voting in a district other than where they live… or worse still, voting multiple times, thereby diluting the legitimate votes of their neighbors.
Having an election on a single day enables the voted ballot to be secure, as standard Election Day polling places are managed by a mixture of Republican and Democrat pollworkers who keep an eye on each other to minimize chicanery.
Now, there are exceptions, as there have always been.
In our efforts to bend over backwards to enable as wide a participation as possible, we have allowed ever-wider loosening of the above designs.
- Since some people are unavoidably away from home on election day – in the hospital, on vacation, traveling for business, serving abroad in the military, etc. – we created absentee ballots, a system wherein ballots are mailed to carefully vetted voters well in advance of the election, so they can return them by mail, hopefully by election day. This system robs them of the information of the final weeks of the campaign, and adds to the risk that their votes may not arrive in time to be counted, but these negatives are considered acceptable – only because without absentee ballots, they could not vote at all. (So, contrary to the current political claim, nobody has ever said that absentee voting was desirable, just that, despite its flaws, it's better than nothing).
- Since some people claim inconvenience, or have an irrational fear of lines, in recent years, various states began to allow in-person early voting, one or two weeks before Election Day. Ostensibly, this would lighten the lines on the real Election Day and enable more people to participate. Since it's in person, the sanctity of the election could still be somewhat protected, as each voter would be checked against their registration, and at such physical polling places, the ballots could be secured. But it does carry the severe negative of cutting off those final weeks of the campaign; by leaving the concept of a single election day, we risk different groups of voters making their decisions based on incomplete information. This fall, some states are planning on well over a month of early voting, infinitely compounding these problems.
- Worst of all, we have allowed onsite voter registration and automatic voter registration at the department of motor vehicles, both of which increase the odds of vote fraud by enabling/encouraging non-citizens to vote, and reducing or eliminating the ability to catch the error in time.
These expansions have contributed to a ballooning of the various types of vote fraud, without improving the value of the election at all, since these expansions both dilute the power and the quality of each legitimate vote cast.
Now, the Left is pushing for wide-scale, even universal, mail-in voting, allegedly because of the fear of the virus – though many Americans rightly doubt if this fear has anything to do with the desire to avoid a virus, and is, rather, all about taking advantage of the fear to make a change that only corrupt Democrat machines want.
The Left attacks the Right for opposing the expansion of vote-by-mail, but refuses to acknowledge the plethora of sound reasons for this opposition. Consider:
- Mail-in voting eliminates the sanctity of the voted ballot. There are no mixtures of Republican and Democrat pollworkers watching as the voter drops the ballot in the blue collection box, and there are no Republican and Democrat pollworkers meeting it upon delivery. No witnesses are in place to see who drops it in the mail; it travels through multiple hands as it moves across the country or the world, and it is finally opened by local bureaucrats, in the cities, members of one party's machine.
- When "push" mail-in voting is used, there is minimal vetting, if any, to guard against multiple voting or noncitizen voting. Ballots are mailed out to every voter and the voters either vote it or not, with no procedure for disposing unvoted ballots to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Who's to say that one partisan in an apartment building won't collect the ballots for his building upon delivery, and cast the ballots himself, without the voters' permission? It happens; the only unknown is how often.
- Even when legitimate mail-in voting is used as a last resort – as for military families stationed abroad, there are multiple reasons why their votes often don't count. Many states simply don't finalize their ballots with enough time built in, they arrive too late, the servicemen or other expats don't mail them back in time, they're delayed in the mail, they arrive after the election, sometimes much too late. It's often not the post office's fault; the time window simply doesn't allow for the process. Mail service to and from our embassies in England or Nigeria, or from our military bases in Iraq or Afghanistan, simply isn't as quick as it is at home, and we cannot expect it to be.
Even without fraud, even without the short time window, one thing has to be admitted about the mail: it is not perfect.
This isn't to insult the workers of the post office, most of whom are fine civil servants who work hard in all kinds of weather to do their job. The majority of first class mail arrives within two or three days, after all.
But it's just a simple fact: the mail is not a perfect system. There is a reason why people pay so much more to have FedEx, UPS, or other services deliver important letters and packages. The mail doesn't haver anything close to a 100% on-time delivery record, which is what you need in an election.
Consider what's carried and delivered by the post office: envelopes and packages of all sizes and shapes, even things shipped without envelopes, such as advertisers, local newspapers, magazines, grocery store ads and travel brochures. All these different shapes cause things to be lost, all the time. It's not the post office's fault; it's just reality.
How many times have you found a bill stuck in the stack of grocery ads, or an unrelated envelope stuck inside a magazine? How many times have we received a big postal envelope with an apology about how the contents were damaged in the process, a week-old or month-old torn-up envelope inside? How many times have your received your neighbor's mail, or him, yours?
This writer himself has received misdelivered mail three days in a row this very week. This is admittedly unusual; the error rate is not normally this high. But so far this week, we received one bill for someone who lives next door, one piece of mail for someone who lives across the street, and one fundraising appeal for a store across town, with the same street number but a completely different street name in the address. The system isn't perfect.
It's not to say that the mail is untrustworthy; just that such judgments are by definition "relative." If we send a birthday card and it arrives late, nobody really cares. If our credit card company's bill is lost in the mail, we can look up our amount due and pay online anyway. If we never receive a brochure or fundraising appeal, we'll never even know we missed it.
In fact, therefore, it's almost certain that the imperfect nature of the mails is far worse than we presume. While we all know that the occasional bill is lost en route to us, we have no way of knowing how much of what we call "junk mail" is lost as well. Surely if we miss out on mail we're expecting, then we must also be missing out on mail we didn't expect; we just don't know about it.
These ballots-by-mail are thin, often a single postcard. Can you imagine them getting caught inside a magazine, or inside a newspaper or grocery ad mailer? Can you imagine them not?
We don't know exactly what the rate of loss or tardiness is with our mail. It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; it varies by type of mail; it varies by time of year.
All we know for certain is that it's imprecise. Is one in five pieces misdelivered? One in ten? One in twenty? One in fifty?
How close was our last gubernatorial election, our last senatorial, our last presidential? Depending on your state, one of these offices may have been a blowout while another was a squeaker.
But we all know that our presidential elections are often decided by two or three percentage points, not just nationally but state-by-state. The margin of victory is less than the margin of postal loss or delay, probably, more often than not.
Even if the regular error rate with the US mail is just a few percent, that's simply not an acceptable option for an election that determines our future, and therefore must be as exact as possible.
Would you trust the mails to send your grandson a hundred dollars in cash? To send your grand daughter a family heirloom diamond ring? To send anything of value at all? Or would you, in such cases, use a private service like FedEx or UPS, just to be safe?
The answer is clear. The post office generally does a fine job of managing a challenging portfolio with a low rate of losses, but even that rate is still far too great to put a national election at risk.
The expansion of voting by mail, beyond those times when it's unavoidable to times when there's no good reason for it at all, is simply unjustifiable. Voting by mail cannot help but increase the rates of vote fraud, misrouted and late ballots, and all the many other chinks in the armor of the American election system.
If we want election integrity – and we must, if we are to remain a republic! – then we must protect the sanctity of the ballot, and resist the temptation to increase the risk of vote fraud in any way.
We must oppose not only the dangerous expansion of mail-in voting, but also all others of the many election tricks that jeopardize the veracity of our election results.
Nothing less than the republic itself is at stake.
Copyright 2020 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. He has been a pollworker, a pollwatcher, and a campaign manager numerous times in many districts, and has seen witnessed too many types of vote fraud to list. The public needs to awaken to this threat to our system before it's too late.
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