welcome to usaapay.com

2020-

2020-11-19 i
"Federal figures regarding mail balloting do not inspire confidence in the system, either. According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, since 2012, more than 28 million mail ballots went unaccounted for and another two million were returned as undeliverable."

An All-Mail Election Would Be Dangerous for Democracy
(from 18 June 2020 at 6:04 PM EDT)

Some Americans need absentee or mail ballots. The sick or physically disabled, for example. Or those who are overseas serving our country in the military or the diplomatic service. And others who, for quite legitimate reasons, won't be in town on Election Day.

But moving to all-mail elections would be dangerous. Ironically, it would likely disenfranchise many voters—the opposite outcome of what proponents of such a change desire.

Absentee ballots are the form of voting most vulnerable to being stolen, altered or forced. In past elections, hundreds of thousands of ballots have been rejected for defects. Millions more have been undelivered, misdelivered or reported missing.

Absentee ballots are cast outside the supervision of election officials and outside the presence of election observers. This destroys the important principle of transparency. It potentially intrudes on the secrecy of the ballot-casting process and subjects voters to intimidation and pressure in their homes.

Anyone who doubts the unscrupulous and fraudulent tactics used to gather absentee ballots should look at a case we were both involved in when we worked at the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. v. Ike Brown. That case demonstrates how vote harvesters—campaign workers and political consultants—abuse the most vulnerable voters. The victims were, as is usually the case, the poor and powerless. They were visited in their homes by politically connected vote harvesters. The vote harvesters voted the ballots—not the voters.

Vote-by-mail also has logistical problems. Our entire election system was designed for in-person voting. We do not have the administrative infrastructure to ensure a clean election based on current voter registration lists. There are serious problems with the accuracy of every single state's voter rolls, some far worse than others.

People are registered multiple times. In some states, the dead remain on the rolls as active registrants for years, sometimes decades. Voter rolls are missing basic information like apartment numbers, birthdates and sometimes even full names. No reasonable person would think we should mail ballots automatically to everyone on these broken lists, which is what some are urging states to do.

This will lead to tens of thousands of ballots—a very valuable commodity—being sent out all over the country to erroneous registrations. Will these ballots get cast anyway by others?
...
Unlike polling place ballots, the absentee ballot system introduces huge blind spots in the chain of custody.

It is in these blind spots where abuses often occur. In June 2017, a postal worker went to federal prison for accepting $1,000 in bribes from South Texas vote harvesters, known as "politiqueros," in exchange for telling them when and where ballots would be delivered on his routes during the 2014 Democratic Party primary contests, so they could obtain the ballots.

If you don't think mail ballot fraud is occurring, then you haven't visited the Heritage Foundation's election fraud database that has a sampling of almost 1,300 proven cases of fraud, including many examples involving absentee or mail-in ballots.

In another example, four Fort Worth, Texas women were charged in 2018 with 30 felony counts as a "paid voter fraud ring" targeting elderly residents during the 2016 elections. The Texas attorney general noted: "Fraudulent applications were generated through forged signatures and by altering historical applications and resubmitting them without the knowledge of the voters. Harvesters also used deception to obtain signatures from voters...some were forced into receiving primary ballots for the political party supported by the harvesters, though it was not the party the voters wanted to vote for." Those cases are still pending.
...
Americans are going to their local grocery stores, pharmacies and retail establishments that have implemented all of the safety protocols recommended by health officials. There is no reason why they can't vote in their neighborhood polling places, too. (read more)

______________________

Permission is hereby granted to any and all to copy and paste any entry on this page and convey it electronically along with its URL,
______________________