Paterson, Nevada and New York: Harbingers of the Disaster that All Mail In Voting Would Bring

AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
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A Miami-Dade County Elections Department employee places a vote-by-mail ballot for the August 18 primary election into a box for rejected ballots as the canvassing board meets at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, Thursday, July 30, 2020, in Doral, Fla. President Donald Trump is for the first time publicly floating a “delay” to the Nov. 3 presidential election, as he makes unsubstantiated allegations that increased mail-in voting will result in fraud. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
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The best way to ensure that your vote is counted is to vote in person so you can see it entered.

Once you move away from that and add in other parties, namely the post office or other people to collect or drop off your ballot, you axiomatically increase the possibility of things not going according to plan even if you assume no fraud.

Now if we take the Post Office which just normally has had problems for years and overload it with all mail in voting, what are the chances that there are problems?

Well, we don’t have to speculate on this. We can just look at what’s happened this year as some shifted to all mail voting for things like municipal elections.

In Paterson, New Jersey, it was a horror show from missing and disqualified ballots to fraud and the dead voting.

Numerous residents complained they never received their ballots despite the fact that according to the records their ballots were mailed in. Ramona Javier was listed as voting but she said she never received a ballot. ”This is corruption. This is fraud,” she said. She had eight relatives and immediate neighbors who had the same problem including one who had been in Florida for weeks. A local councilman said he personally knew of a dozen more cases. “Where is the fair process,” Luis Velez replied.

Ballots were submitted from out of towners and three dead people even voted (but without listing the cemetery as their residence).

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About 20% of the votes sent in were disqualified, the most common reason being the signatures didn’t match. Other reasons not filling out the ballot correctly. That’s at least a place where they would have a signature verification for mail in, many might not.

From NBC:

Videos are surfacing online of a single voter carrying numerous ballots. Postal workers were seen leaving some ballots sitting out in building lobbies. And hundreds of filled out ballots were found by postal workers in single mailboxes in Paterson, suggesting a possible vote bundling operation which election experts say is a crime. In one case, officials said more than 300 Paterson city ballots were found in a single mailbox in an entirely different town: Haledon.

Four people have been charged with fraud in casting mail-in votes, unauthorized possession of ballots, tampering with public records and falsifying or tampering with records, according to the statement.

Additionally one of those four who was also one of the candidates, Alex Mendez, was additionally charged with election fraud and false registration or transfer.

Some of the politicians have filed for a recount and Mendez’s race, they’ve agreed to have a “do-over” with a new election to sort out the mess.

But this isn’t just Paterson as Mark Hemingway of Real Clear Politics explained.

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Then there’s this mess in Nevada which would likely apply to most places who haven’t even begun to do the work to verify addresses. 223,000 ballots were “undeliverable.”

From Free Beacon:

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election integrity group, reviewed the 1.3 million mail-in ballots Nevada’s Clark County sent during the June primary. It found that more than 223,000 of the ballots were sent to outdated addresses, leading the postal service to designate them as “undeliverable.” The undeliverable ballots accounted for 17 percent of all ballots mailed to registered voters. Nearly 75 percent of Nevada’s total population resides in the county, which includes Las Vegas.

“These numbers show how vote by mail fails,” said J. Christian Adams, PILF’s president and general counsel. “New proponents of mail balloting don’t often understand how it actually works. States like Oregon and Washington spent many years building their mail voting systems and are notably aggressive with voter list maintenance efforts. Pride in their own systems does not somehow transfer across state lines. Nevada, New York, and others are not and will not be ready for November.”

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In New York they didn’t know the results of the June primary even into August and 1 in 5 of the ballots were disqualified.

We need to know the results in the presidential election by Dec. 14 for the electoral college vote. Even without fraud, the logistics of systems who haven’t done this before doing it for November is a recipe for disaster.

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