The BRAD BLOG has long detailed the dangers of Vote-by-Mail and absentee balloting, describing the practice as “terrible for democracy,” for a number of reasons. Among those reasons are the ease by which absentee ballots can be undetectably gamed, bought or sold, used for intimidation (“Show me that you voted this particular way or you will be fired/beaten, etc.”) or otherwise lost in the mail, never added to the optically-scanned computer tally, etc., just to name a few.
Usually when we point these matters out, we’ll get some amount of push back, most notably from someone from Oregon, where many voters love their all Vote-by-Mail elections (despite all the dangers, as demonstrated once again by the recent stories out of the state where, in one, a man was convicted of fraud after offering $20 for blank, unvoted ballots prior to the 2012 election, and another where an election official was charged with fraud after it was discovered she was filling in unvoted races in favor of Republicans while processing incoming mailed ballots.)
We’ll also get push back, in such cases, from partisans (usually Democrats in heavily “blue” jurisdictions, but also, occasionally from Republicans in heavily “red” jurisdictions) who argue that Vote-by-Mail increases turnout, therefore it is good for democracy, despite all of those dangers which they marginalize as being greatly exaggerated.
We most recently saw this dynamic play out in Colorado, where, as we reported in some detail last week, a sweeping election reform bill is moving through the Democratically-controlled legislature and is likely to land on the Democratic Governor’s desk very soon. The ambitious bill does a number of very good things, such as allow voter registration up until the day of the election, and offers other reasonable improvements to elections in the state and voters’ accessibility to them. On the other hand, the legislation also would send an absentee/Vote-by-Mail ballot to every single registered voter in the state, whether they actually wanted one or not.
In opposing the bill, Colorado Republicans foolishly focused on the possibility of “voter fraud” via the enhanced voter registration provisions in the bill, which — though it was crafted in part by the state election clerks’ association (which has a majority Republican representation) — was passed in the legislature along party lines.
What the Republicans failed to highlight — but certainly should have — in their attempts to try and defeat the bill, is the massive fraud capacity presented by the insane idea of sending a blank, unvoted absentee ballot to every single voter in the state.
The following news out of Los Angeles this week underscores, yet again, how that sort of thing is an absolute recipe for election fraud disaster…
According to a spokeswoman for L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, prosecutors are trying to determine whether backers of one candidate illegally filled out mail-in ballots for dozens of voters in the Armenian enclave in East Hollywood. The May 21 election will decide who succeeds Eric Garcetti, who is running for mayor.
…
The complaint alleges that O’Farrell campaign workers filled out voters’ ballots for their candidate while telling them they were voting for Sam Kbushyan, a candidate of Armenian descent who ran and lost during the primary election.
Kbushyan and many of his former campaign volunteers are now working on behalf of O’Farrell.
The O’Farrell campaign rebuts the allegations, saying it was [opposition candidate John] Choi workers who filled out and took ballots from voters. “These are Choi people who are doing this,” O’Farrell spokeswoman Renee Nahum said.
Nahum said the campaign plans to file its own complaint with the district attorney that will include testimony from voters who said they gave their ballots to Choi campaign workers who claimed that they were representing Kbushyan.
…
Interviews with several voters listed in the Choi complaint suggest improper activity occurred, although it was unclear who was responsible.
Eighty-two-year-old Raffik Hambardzumyan told the Los Angeles Times that an Armenian-speaking woman came to his house and helped him and his wife fill out their vote-by-mail ballots about a week ago. Hambardzumyan, who doesn’t speak English, said the woman told them they were voting for Kbushyan.
He was surprised when a reporter told him Kbushyan wasn’t on the ballot.
…
Galust Khachatryan, 65, said he was recently visited by two campaign workers who didn’t help him vote but did take his ballot. He said they were the same workers who appeared at his home during the primary campaign on behalf of Kbushyan, but said he didn’t know which campaign they were supporting now.
We haven’t looked into the details of the above case to tell you which campaign may or may not be telling the truth about who did what. But, in this case, we have both campaigns claiming the other committed absentee ballot fraud. Neither campaign seems to be claiming that it either didn’t happen, nor that safeguards were in place to keep it from happening had it not been discovered and reported by the opposing campaign.
As unrestricted Vote-by-Mail elections become more and more pervasive around the country — particularly as partisans for the Democratic Party see Vote-by-Mail as political advantageous to them — you can expect to see many more stories like the one above.
While Republicans continue to focus on nearly-non-existent cases of voter impersonation fraud at the polling place which, they disingenuously claim, can only be deterred by polling place Photo ID restrictions (meant only to disproportionately disenfranchise perfectly legal Democratic-leaning voters), the real threat of fraudulent ballots in elections, as long-documented, comes almost entirely from absentee/Vote-by-Mail ballots.
Republicans continue to focus on polling place “voter fraud”, not because they actually care about it, but because they see it as a way to restrict Democratic turnout. Democrats focus on expanded Vote-by-Mail (and other ill-considered ideas, such as Internet Voting), not because it increases access to democracy, as they like to claim, but because (as they foolishly see it) it increases their chances of being elected by what they believe will be increased voter turnout by a younger, Democratic-leaning electorate.
In both cases, the political parties are, as expected, playing politics with elections. But for those of us concerned about actual democracy and Election Integrity, rather than party politics, its easy to see what the dangers are, and how to avoid them. Pushing back against the rising tide of Vote-by-Mail elections is one way to do so.
Once again, if you’d like to review just some of the reasons why Vote-by-Mail is a terrible idea for democracy, here is one of our very short, bullet-point lists which speaks to that issue.
PRESIDENT PROPOSALS
Reduce deficits by over $4 Trillion over ten years by 2.25-to-1 ratio spend cuts to new taxes.
$666 Billion over ten years for infrastructure repairs.
Universal access to prekindergarten education funded by new taxes on tobacco
Repeal automatic cuts by sequestration.
Reduce agriculture subsidies for wealthy farm owners
Stop individuals from receiving both unemployment and disability payments
Raise Medicare premiums for wealthy retirees.
Negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare patients.
Limit tax deductions and loopholes for the top 2 percent of income earners
(how about Bush Tax Cuts?)
Make permanent tax credits for low income earners via American Opportunity Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit.
Proposes closing some corporate tax loopholes and lowering corporate tax rates.
How about cutting Defense?
How about Means Testing Social Security and Medicare. Why should my multi-millionaire pals get them?
Why do so many people miss the boat on election fraud and election security? It is astonishing.
they claim that absentee voting increases participation, without mentioning that since it divorces the warm body from the vote, we have no idea how many actual voters participated. As Victoria Collier said earlier this week:
“Participation is used to justify every kind of voting system that doesn’t provide for public authentication and chain of custody.”
If “increased participation” is the be all and end all, why not just have PSYCHIC VOTING. From their home or workplace, everyone just takes a minute to beam their thoughtwaves to the central tabulating psychic. Like mail/absentee voting, there is no warm body (just astral projection). Like electronic voting, there is no paper trail. It’s the logical, cost-effective extension of both systems. If participation matters, and accuracy and verifiability don’t matter at all, then why not? [SATIRE]
Brad, your sub title drives home the biggest
reason why election laws don’t honor the citizen’s
“Full Voting Rights”…
I am a bit confused. I am one of those Oregonians who has voted by mail since I was drafted in the 60’s.
Is there any evidence that there is any more fraud etc than voting with those damn machines?
Here comes the ‘one’ Oregon pushback . . .
See, Brad, I really agree with your position and your points of argument. I don’t think that my aim is to ‘pushback’ but rather to ‘pull back.’ to practicality, and reality, and ‘politics of the possible‘; (and I detest that phrase as I’ve heard Professional Politicians say dismissing proposals (of mine, “not possible“) that would dislodge them).
Which is to say, Oregon VBM is better in practice than the way balloting was done in past years. NOT saying VBM is the best way.
Paper ballots, hand-marked and hand-counted in open view — that is the best way.
Sometimes it sounds to me like you consider VBM and touch-screen voting as equally faulty. Those are the times I try to speak up (although my attendance is erratic) and say, ‘VBM has paper ballots, at least, and that’s one part more desirable than invisible TV touches.’ How is it not obvious to everyone that touch-screen computers totally make up out of thin air the ‘tally’ that’s reported and there is not an iota of material evidence or exhibit to substantiate the numbers?
Haptic tangible paper ballots, (whether regular or absentee), are waaaay better than nothing, better than waving a finger in the air and imagining the TVscreen ‘felt’ it.
Look at your LA City Council candidates, for instance Brad, in their frauds. Paper (absentee) ballots are involved.
Somebody came in the home and marked the ballots (albeit wrongly) for the homebodies. They can attest who he was(is). Somewhere the (wrongly) marked ballot does exist, perhaps retrievable. Just that there are bodies and material objects being located at certain places for periods of time AND, however difficult or sketchy, with an investigation of the matters of fact and trail of custody (of ‘objects’), it is not impossible to put together charges and named indictments and prosecute a trial of the case. (As opposed to electronic voting — in which some voters don’t even realize they voted, that someone else (the computer) voted in their stead since they didn’t show up ‘Tuesday’ at the polls — in which filing charges and making a case is absolutely impossible.)
Merely the actual bulk, material limits, and existential fact of paper ballots (all absentee), narrows the ways and shortens the means to accomplish fraud (balloting). One person might get to a few ballots (of spouse, relative, in-law, absent child, disabled parent) and spoil or fraud them. It’s insignificant damage. One person has only so much time in a day and only so many places to steal ballots — time and travel both finite — and it’s not enough for one person’s efforts to spoil the election outcome.
If ever one person procured 20 or 50 or 100 or 200 ballots … the crime reaches actionable visible size, it registers on the civics radar screen, either by its anomalous statistical affect(s) or by declarative victim complaint(s).
Yeah, (s)he can ruin ballots. Just not very many.
It’s hard to get ahold of a stack of ballots when they are unstacked and dispersed one-per-mailbox spread out across the jurisdiction.
There are very few single-person loose-cannon fraud agents among us voters. And their subversion is minimal, as individuals and in total.
Even the Oregon woman (you mentioned) convicted of marking multiple ballots, only got to two (2!) of them, (before she was caught in the act), and she was in the ballot-counting room! at the time where there were stacks! and stacks! of ballots.
Maybe the reason we barely hear anecdotal telling of one person with inordinate ballots, is because such cases are practically nonexistent, mostly imagined … by fears of the hypothetical.
Any organizing colluding conspiracy of more than one person in fraud also gives itself away … at the threshhold point where it (the fraud ‘group’) is first able to make enough trouble to matter. Again the LA Council races’ activities demonstrate that coordinated fraud is readily detectable early enough to stop. Three people can keep a secret only if two are dead. If the fraud group is seen associated some way with a candidate’s team, let that disqualify and remove the candidate from the ballot.
Vote-by-Mail is not foolproof. But it hardly warrants the hair-on-fire alarm as blazes against TVscreen ballots and figment computer tallies. In which one (programmer) person can defraud thousands of votes, and tens of thousands, in a single precinct. jeebers freaking jeebers do away with electronic voting; gawdforbid it via internet
So, Brad, I don’t know. But going on writing ‘shame & crime’ for fraud TVB(allots) can not bring hand-counted paper-ballot elections to voters … by shameless Official lawmakers who were elected and are kept in Office by the fraud TVB.
Vote-by-Mail might be an interim method with leverage to unseat the computer-elected criminals for now, and put in their stead decent office-holders who go on to enact elections procedures using hand-counted ballots. V-by-M is just verifiable enough to defeat today’s candidates who haven’t (yet) found how to rig the US mail paper trail to favor themselves in office.
Vote-by-Mail enacted in Oregon flushed the frauds out of office rather quickly, (in the politics time-scale). Namely, we ousted ex-Senator Gordon Smith, who got ‘re-purposed’ in federal cronyism and now presides (last time I checked) over the Nat’l Assoc. of Broadcasters (NAB) … hanging out there promoting Touch-the-TV voting, doubtlessly.
Help America Vote Act – the HAVA, (which infested money and computer-vote corruption in 50 States’ elections for George Debris Bush ’04) is another anti-democracy Act in the 8-year dictator’s list enacted unjustly by the Debris Administration which must ALL be overturned, reversed, repealed and rejected en banc.
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P.S. Hi Bev, glad to see you here. You ROCK!
crap! I missed closing italics. after I proofread specifically for that
[Fixed it for ya. – BF]
Meremark –
This comment, like the last one you left on a Vote-by-Mail related article, is too long for me to respond to point-by-point. So, forgive me for just pulling out just a few of your points to quickly respond to.
Actually, I often hear from others in Oregon as well with “pushback” after I write about my concerns about VBM. Many of them love it far more than you appear to! 🙂
While it might be like comparing a broken leg to two broken legs and two broken arms, no, I don’t think VBM is as bad as touch-screen. Touch-screen is 100% unverifiable, while VBM allows voters to attempt to verify some aspects of the election, even though, like touch-screen, it includes the use of computers to secretly tally votes and it’s next-to impossible to know if the votes tallied were actually the ones cast and the ones actually cast by the voters said to have cast them.
VBM also presents issues that 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting doesn’t (such as vote buying, selling, intimidation, etc.)
That said, I don’t believe I’ve ever compared the dangers of VBM to the complete failure of touch-screen voting until this comment, since you brought it up.
As to your argument that VBM is “waaay better than nothing”. Well, yes, if by nothing you mean touch-screens, then yes, I’d agree, having a broken leg is “waaay” better than having two broken legs and two broken arms.
You will not, however, ever find me advocating in favor of a broken leg. And in jurisdictions where officials are calling for breaking the legs of all voters (as in CO, where they will be sending absentee ballots to all voters, whether they want them or not, or here in CA where officials encourage VBM so much that it now comprises more than 50% of the vote), I will be advocating against breaking ones legs, especially since it can be completely avoided.
Hope that clarifies, and we can get back to be 90% in agreement on the related issues here 🙂