My how the worm has turned. In the 2020 presidential election, anyone who dared warn of the integrity of mail-in ballots or illegal ballot harvesting was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or an enemy of democracy.
Now many Democrats are expressing alarm over vote-by-mail Postal Service delays and even ballot harvesting.
Senator Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Governmental Affairs Committee, has written Postmaster General Louis DeJoy complaining that he has “significant concerns including the potential for degraded rural service due to fewer facilities, delayed delivery of election mail that would be processed at out-of-state facilities, and lack of transparency.”
The voter registrar in Richmond, Virginia warned voters to avoid the US Post Service and drop off early-voting ballots in person: “The reports we’ve been receiving about delayed, misplaced, or even missing mail are deeply troubling.”
In Connecticut, Democratic Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas advised voters to cast their ballots in person after the Bridgeport mayor’s race was declared fraudulent due to illegal ballot harvesting.
Last year, in a Wisconsin lawsuit to overturn a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that found ballot drop boxes are illegal, a leading liberal election law firm even admitted that U.S. Postal Service mailboxes are in fact “unsecured.”
As our CTUP election integrity expert John Fund has pointed out: “It used to be that concerns over mail-in ballots were widespread and bipartisan.” In 2005, the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform – which was chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker – overwhelmingly concluded that “vote by mail” did little to improve voter turnout but “is, however, likely to increase the risks of fraud and of contested elections….”
Vote-by-mail rules were ostensibly changed in 2020 due to COVID. For an honest election this year and going forward it’s imperative that voters aren’t permitted to cast ballots outside the scrutiny of election officials.
