The Pitfalls of Mail in Voting

In a democracy, the voter gets to elect his government officials, in secret, by voting, on election day.  Back in the 1800’s there were stories of the boss standing next to you when you filled out the ballot.  Not cool.  Think twice about voting by mail.  Your name and address are on the ballot being returned.  The government can cull out the opposition by recording how the vote was cast.  You can’t claim that you voted for someone else, it is right there in black and white.

In each election, millions of dollars are spent on advertising, to try and win your vote.  With mail-in ballots, going to every registered voter, voters who don’t even care to vote will get ballots.  Why spend on advertising in the media for your vote?  It could be a lot cheaper to buy each vote for $200 to $1,000. With a budget of 50 million, one could buy 50,000 to 250,000 unmarked but signed ballots.  This turns the mail-in ballot into a bonus check.  There is a claim that this already happened in Michigan during the previous election.  This should be illegal.  Many of our poor would rather have $1,000 in hard cash rather than voting in an election.  Notice that the time span from the delivery of the vote until the election, pretty much makes the blank ballots a fungible commodity that can be recovered and processed in a timely manner.

Another thing to look at is the voter rolls. 2.7 million people die each year in the US. That could be 2 million dead people on the rolls just for that year.  In some districts, they purge your name if you don’t vote in two general elections.  8 years of dead people amounts to 16 million dead people on the voter rolls. Mailing out a ballot to all of them might change the election results.  They have registered voters that would be 120 years old in some states. The neat thing here, you don’t have to pay dead voters for their vote.

Each year many families move for one reason or another, and re-register to vote.  This can create a duplicate second mail in ballot. A close friend of mine, moved to Pennsylvania three years ago and still received a mail in ballot for the California election. Nothing was done illegal, they moved and the election board had no idea. My next-door neighbor died last May, and I am sure he got a ballot in the mail.

The voter election rolls determine how many voters are eligible to vote.  The mail in ballot was never meant to be for most voters.  Basically, the mail in votes were a very small number compared to the whole group of voters and the ballot had to be requested. It was different this year in California, everyone that was registered, got a mail-in ballot.  Many were ineligible to vote, dead or had moved from their registered address.  In-person voting eliminates many of the errors in polling records.  Some will not vote, because of the time and commitment involved.  Notice, if everyone listed on the voting roll can vote absentee, the ability to steal an election increases proportionally.  Your absentee ballot can be sold for cash.

If the people in charge of the voter registration are from one political party, elections can be massaged with mail-in voting.  It is not hard to compile a list of dead voters or of people who have moved out of state. This method of rigging an election is not perceivable if done surreptitiously. But in this age of computer technology, it is not hard to research and discover some of the voter fraud.  With the census that was recently taken, it might be a very easy thing to validate voter registrations by comparing it to the census data. 

Can we afford to have universal mail-in ballots?  It lends itself to internal corruption when one party runs the balloting process. The real question, is it fair that a ballot can be turned into cash?  Maybe the Supreme Court can settle the case.  If it can’t, elections will not be determined by the voters, rather the people running the election process will do it for you.  Its kind of like going into an “all you can eat restaurant.” You get up and go for seconds and are told “That’s all you can eat.”