Call us old-fashioned, but why can’t we go back to election DAY??? At this point, we’d even settle for election month.
The first ballots of the 2024 election are already going out. North Carolina begins mailing absentee ballots today. Pennsylvania will begin in-person early voting in just ten days.
COVID was exploited by governors and bureaucrats who issued new rules that meant more than 100 million Americans – 69% of those voting – cast ballots early in-person or by mail in 2020.
Data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission show almost 15 million mail ballots effectively disappeared after election officials gave them to the U.S. Postal Service to deliver to voters. Remember: we’ve had several presidential elections of late, decided by fewer than 100,000 votes.
To put that 15 million figure in perspective, consider this: Joe Biden carried Arizona by 10,457 votes, yet in Phoenix’s Maricopa County alone, some 110,092 ballots to outdated or wrong addresses. Biden carried Nevada by 33,596 votes; Las Vegas’ Clark County sent 93,279 ballots that election officials say are “unaccounted” for.
An additional 1.1 million ballots were sent to the wrong addresses in 2020 – the U.S. Postal Service said they were “undeliverable.” This year, those states with automatic voter registration or which automatically mail absentee ballots will make that problem worse. Some voters registered more than once will get more than one ballot. People living in a household with deceased registrants or someone who has moved away will often get a ballot.
Sloppy U.S. voting rules make it important there be as many election observers on the ground this November as possible, and that pressure is applied on officials to enforce mail-in ballot safeguards. And maybe we should have Canada send election observers south to teach us how they make it both easy to vote and hard to cheat.