Is mail-in voting a recipe for fraud?
Dan Henninger, Wall Street Journal, weighs in on the controversy over mail-in voting if coronavirus spikes up in November
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Imagine an election where a ballot is sent to a person regardless of eligibility, signed by someone else, picked up and delivered by a campaign operative, and still counted. If Democrats got their way, that is what would happen in Nevada this June, and nationwide in November.
Democrats have sued Nevada in an attempt to block the state from enforcing election laws on the books in their upcoming primary. Their demands? Nevada must suspend its prosecution of ballot harvesters, where the practice is illegal, and refuse to allow election officials to verify signatures on ballots, contrary to state law. They claim this basic check to see whether a ballot is from the same voter who signed up to vote is “not needed to ensure the integrity of the election."
This is the Democrats’ standard for “integrity” in elections. The first red flag should have been that it is Marc Elias and Perkins Coie who are doing the suing.
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If you need a refresher, Perkins Coie is the Democratic law firm, paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign, that hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Donald Trump in 2016. They failed, but still compiled a dossier full of foreign-solicited lies about Trump and Russia, which was leaked by Obama intelligence officials to try to sabotage the new president’s administration, sow doubt in his election victory, and invalidate the votes of 63 million Americans. Not the best track record on “integrity.”
But why wait to sow confusion and doubt after an election when Democrats can do so before? That is their ongoing campaign to remove voting safeguards through the courts, and now using a pandemic to fundamentally upend the way we vote to further their political aims.
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Elias and Perkins Coie first threatened to sue Nevada unless the state breaks its own voting laws. You read that right. In a letter sent to the secretary of state, Elias demanded election officials throw out signature verification requirements.
To Elias and the Democrats, it is OK if a signature on a ballot does not even remotely match a voter’s registration on file. They claim election officials do not have the “necessary expertise” to check, even though signature verification is already conducted on every voter registration in Nevada and checked for every voter who shows up at the polls. Voters also have the chance to contact election officials in the event of a mistake.
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Democrats demand in-person voting be expanded in Nevada, after just claiming it was too dangerous to go to the polls in Wisconsin. Last week, Elias called in-person voting a “national disgrace.” Now, Elias says “converting to an all-mail election in a matter of weeks” is impossible, and voting must be expanded “safely in person.” Nice of them to catch up to the fact that one-size-fits-all nationalized mail-in voting is a bad idea.
While they tried and failed to allow people to vote a full week after Election Day in Wisconsin, Democrats are still committed to expanding ballot harvesting and weakening ballot security.
Democrats also want ballots sent to “all registered voters in Nevada,” regardless of whether the voter has moved away. This would increase the number of ballots in circulation far beyond those eligible to vote.
For its primary, Nevada is providing mail-in ballots to active voters, but not inactive ones. Registrations are marked “inactive” only after officials have received reliable information such as from the U.S. Postal Service that the voter has moved and fails to respond to a mailing asking the voter to confirm his or her address.
It is critical that mail-in voting has these safeguards, given fraud is easier by mail, and states are known to have millions of dead and ineligible voters on their rolls.
In 2018 there were over 239,000 inactive voters in Nevada, meaning Democrats want roughly a quarter-million extra ballots floating around during the primary. This would be convenient for their “voter assistance” plans, the Democrats’ euphemistic go-around for ballot harvesting in states where it is banned.
Democrats are using “social distancing” as an excuse to allow campaign operatives to traffic in ballots, and stop the enforcement of crucial voter integrity laws. In Nevada, it is a felony for a person to handle a ballot other than their own. The law already has an exception for a voter to allow an authorized family member to return their ballot, making Democrats’ excuses ring hollow.
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It is not really about social distancing. If it were, Democrats would not want to put their campaign operatives at risk by sending them door-to-door to handle thousands of ballots.
The only thing Democrats are consistent on is their mission to gut voting integrity. And their hypocrisy.
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