Elections Expert Shatters Leftist Narratives on Mail-in Voting
With members of the Democratic Party voicing concerns over in-person voting following the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic, left-wingers now are pushing for a universal vote-by-mail system.
For months, President Donald Trump has pushed back against that sentiment, pointing out that such a system would be susceptible to voter fraud, thereby threatening the integrity of the general election on Nov. 3.
In a universal vote-by-mail election, ballots are sent to every registered voter. Many states have implemented this type of voting, but the types of elections aren’t uniform.
Speaking with The Western Journal, Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, explained that several problems exist with universal vote-by-mail. He said he has concerns over the vast amount of disinformation surrounding the potential radical change to the American voting system.
Snead describes the Honest Elections Project as a “nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog group” advocating for “the right of every American to participate in free and fair elections.”
Snead called universal mail-in voting “an unnecessary and risky policy,” especially given the little amount of time there is to prepare for such a massive change in the voting process before November.
In Snead’s opinion, there isn’t enough time to develop the infrastructure, test the process, or even educate voters on how the system works.
In absentee, or early, voting, which is available in every state, voters must ask their state for an absentee ballot. Qualified voters will be sent that ballot in the mail.
Snead said a vote-by-mail election is much more susceptible to fraud because “you automatically receive a ballot in the mail unsolicited [if you are a registered voter]. You don’t have to do anything to receive it.”
“So when it comes to the idea of universally mailing ballots to all voter registrations, we know the ballots will go to the wrong place or go out in the names of voters who are deceased,” he added. “It introduces lots of problems. It risks chaos and voter confusion and unnecessarily opens the door to fraud as well,” Snead told The Western Journal.
Snead went into further detail about what forms of fraud pertain to this process that so many Democrats eagerly favor.
“The fraud aspect of the concern stems from a couple of different sources. One is the fact that we know that state voter rolls are, in many cases, significantly inaccurate. In fact, researchers at the Pew Center estimated a few years ago that one in eight voter registrations nationwide are outdated,” he said.
The research he cited comes from a 2012 report that found 51 million eligible citizens were unregistered to vote. That figure represents more than 24 percent of the eligible population.
If ballots are sent to the voters on those outdated rolls, Snead explained, it is guaranteed that a significant number of ballots are sent to old addresses where voters no longer live, the addresses of voters who have recently died, and even citizens who have been disqualified from voting.
He continued by explaining that he and others saw this problem arise in Nevada, New Jersey and other places “where ballots are going out, and instead of being returned undoable, they just wind up getting dumped in apartment lobbies or trash cans or even sidewalks.”
“You have these large collections of ballots that are automatically going out and just being left behind,” Snead said. “That’s a pretty clear indication to folks that these people probably are not qualified voters, probably are not going to come back and ask questions about why someone voted in their name. And that’s … a mark for people who might want to cheat the system.”
Only a few days before New Jersey’s third-largest city, Paterson, held a municipal election earlier this month, postal workers found hundreds of ballots suspiciously bundled together. Following an investigation into the ballots and the levying of multiple charges of voter fraud, a new election was ordered. New Jersey was using a mail-in ballot system.
In the other state cited by Snead, Nevada, 1.3 million ballots were mailed to voters in the Las Vegas area, according to Business Insider. Hundreds of thousands of those ballots were either never delivered or delivered to incorrect addresses.
“When you’re also undermining other ballot safeguards like witness requirements, signature match, all of which are designed to ensure that the person voting a ballot is who they say they are, because after all, if you’re voting at home, not in a polling place, there’s no one there to make sure that you are who you say you are so you have to do something else to satisfy that basic requirement,” Snead continued.
All of these things, he explained, create the “opportunity for fraud” and take away “the tools that a state could use to detect that fraud.”
When it comes to ballot harvesting, which is the organized process of using third parties to gather ballots from voters, Snead detailed that not only can ballots be stolen, but harvesters have the means to pressure and intimidate voters into voting a particular way, as well as the means to alter or destroy ballots if they choose.
Snead then used North Carolina as an example of the fraudulent practice.
In 2019, a North Carolina elections director announced that a Republican operative had used an illegal and well-funded ballot-harvesting operation to aid in the election of a GOP congressional candidate.
In response to the many criticisms of universal vote-by-mail, many advocates for the system on the left claim that vote-by-mail is no different than the already established system of absentee voting.
Let’s make this clear:
Mail-in voting is the EXACT SAME THING as absentee voting.
The only difference?
Trump wants you to vote “absentee” if you are a Republican,
And stop your “mail-in” vote if you’re a Democrat.
Trump wants to suppress the vote. We can’t let him.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 1, 2020
Absentee voting and voting by mail are the same thing.
Absentee voting and voting by mail are the same thing.
Absentee voting and voting by mail are the same thing.
Absentee voting and voting by mail are the same thing.
Someone tell the president.
— Lily Adams (@adamslily) August 13, 2020
Snead made it clear to The Western Journal that that is far from the truth.
“There is, I think, a deliberate misrepresentation of what vote-by-mail is. And we’re seeing it being made by activists, repeated by politicians. I think it’s really a game of hide-the-ball. And part of the reason for that is that they know that they are making blanket, sweeping, really quite extreme proposals to change the way our democracy functions,” the director of the Honest Elections Project explained.
“These proposals in many cases have been rejected, and in better times, and they want to make it seem like it’s a less extreme thing than it is. And so they play these games of rhetorical dances to try to say that automatically mailing a ballot to every voter registration and then taking away these basic safeguards that help to ensure that the process works orderly and smoothly and is free of fraud is somehow just the same thing as asking for an absentee ballot in a traditional election.”
According to Snead, the main difference between mail-in voting and absentee voting has nothing to do with the ballot, and that making such a suggestion is misleading. The ballots are the same, but the processes for acquiring them are different.
“I’d like to put it another way,” he said. “If there’s no difference between traditional absentee balloting and a vote-by-mail election, then why did New Jersey make a big deal about announcing that it is changing to a vote-by-mail election? Why did Nevada make a big announcement that it is moving to a vote-by-mail election? Why did California make the announcement that it is moving to a vote-by-mail election if there’s truly no difference?
“I think everyone knows there is, but for political reasons, they just don’t want to say so.”
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