Mailing It In

I distinctly remember the last time I listened to National Public Radio.

It was in the fall of 2000. Close to the presidential election.

That was the year that Oregon, which had dabbled for more than a decade in mail-in voting in state elections, became the first state to go to voting by mail for president.

Twenty years later, only four other states have joined in: Washington, Hawaii, Utah and Colorado.

With the current Covid-19 pandemic, though, many Democrats are beating the drum for universal mail-in voting this fall. Like so many other voting initiatives proposed by the left: allowing prisoners to vote, inviting illegal aliens to cast ballots and doing away with voter IDs, this does nothing to protect the integrity of elections.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

First let me back up and tell you about NPR. 

On that memorable November day I was listening to news analyst Juan Williams reporting on Oregon’s bold election experiment.

Williams took a call from an Oregon voter who gushed about how well the first mail-in presidential vote had gone.

I wasn’t taking notes - I was driving - but the conversation went something like this:

Williams: So tell us, how did you find the experience of mail-in voting?

Caller: It was great! So easy.

Williams: Excellent. Can you explain how it worked?

Caller: Well, I filled out my ballot and because my boyfriend never votes, I filled out his ballot too and mailed them both in!

Williams: All right then. Thanks for calling.

I nearly drove into a tree. 

A woman had just admitted to election fraud and the host of a national radio show didn’t scold her, threaten to turn her in or remind his audience not to try this at home.

I listened for a few more minutes, thinking Williams would realize what the woman had said and make it clear to listeners that she’d broken the law.

Didn’t happen.

I switched to a country music station and never went back.

Shenanigans such as that should give us all pause. So should the alarming ballot harvesting that went on in North Carolina in 2018 when an aide to a Republican candidate for Congress ran around collecting absentee ballots.

It’s naive to believe that a hasty mail-in voting program for this November won’t result in more irregularities.

Even the New York Times, in a piece headlined “Trump Is Pushing A False Argument On Vote-By Mail Fraud,” admitted there were legitimate concerns about mail-in voting 

“Election fraud in the United States is very rare, but the most common type of such fraud in the United States involves absentee ballots,” Richard L. Hasan, election expert from the University of California Irvine School of Law told the Times.

Isn’t that what mail-in voting is? A giant absentee voting scheme?

While Democrats have generally favored mail voting — which works in a very similar way to absentee voting — some have balked at its widespread use because of the reduced level of security when voters are not required to appear at the polls, continued the Times.

Douglas A. Kellner, a co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, is among the Democrats who have raised flags about voting by mail.

“If you analyze all the steps involved in a mail election you start to see where the weak points are for fraud,” Mr. Kellner said, pointing out vulnerabilities in the process, among them the chance that ballots may be intercepted in the mail and forged.

Mr. Kellner recalls an absentee ballot harvesting scheme at New York nursing homes during the 1980s that led to changes in the law limiting who may help a nursing home resident fill out a ballot. It was among rules that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo suspended last month for the coronavirus pandemic.

Great.

Rules enacted to protect the integrity of elections have been suspended in New York because of the virus.

There’s more.

You’d expect an elected official from a state with universal mail-in voting to be eager to see the program go national.

You would be wrong.

Politico reported yesterday that Congressman Greg Walden of Oregon, a proponent of mail-in balloting, warned that going to a national mail-in ballot for the election this fall would be a “recipe for disaster.”

Walden, a Republican, noted that he does not oppose mail-in voting but said his state's process was formulated through a “long, multi-decade experience” before becoming the nation’s first vote-by-mail state in 2000.

“I can’t imagine in the middle of this crisis, and what our states are dealing with, that federally, we would say, ‘Oh, by the way, before November, you all have to do vote-by-mail,” Walden told POLITICO Wednesday

“I mean, we have a statewide database. It took a long time to get that up and perfected so that people couldn’t vote from multiple counties, or register in multiple counties.”

Walden continued: “And I think what the Democrats ran into with their caucus in Iowa, where they thought they had the whiz-bang program to count delegate votes, and we all saw the disaster out of that. And so I think this is a horrible time to suddenly mandate to our states, here’s how you’re going to run the next election. Oh, and by the way, you have just a couple of months to pull it off.”

And ProPublica warned about fraud in a recent piece, “Voting by Mail Would Reduce Coronoavirus Transmission But it Has Other Risks”:

There is bipartisan consensus that mail-in ballots are the form of voting most vulnerable to fraud. A 2005 commission led by President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III — George W. Bush’s secretary of state — concluded that these ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Ballot harvesting scandals, in which political operatives tamper with absentee ballots that voters have entrusted to them, have marred recent elections in North Carolina and Texas.

Here’s how federal elections ought to work: Election Day should be a national holiday. Polling places - and there should be many more than there are now to cut down on wait times - should open at midnight and close 24 hours later.  No early voting.

Everyone should have to show ID to cast a ballot. Absentee ballots should be offered only to those who truly can’t get to a polling place on the appointed day.

Mailing in ballots suggests that voting is a chore, like paying a bill or wading through junk mail.

It’s not. Voting is a right that should be celebrated.

The best way to do that?

At the polls. In person. On Election Day.