Tag Archives: mail in ballots

The Problem With Mail-In Ballots

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On Monday, The Independent Journal Review posted an article about signature verification used on mail-in ballots in Nevada.

The article reports:

For the second congressional election in a row, a journalist has demonstrated that there is a potential hole that could be exploited in the way one Nevada county deals with mail-in ballots.

In 2020, columnist Victor Joecks of the Las Vegas Review-Journal tested Clark County, Nevada’s signature verification process for mail-in ballots, and found that eight ballots were accepted in which the handwriting on the envelope containing the ballot and the ballot itself was different.

This year, six ballots made it through, he wrote in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“I had 11 people send me a picture of their ballot envelope. I then wrote their name in my handwriting. Each voter then copied my version of their signature onto their ballot return envelope.

“They sent me a picture to ensure it wasn’t their normal handwriting. This simulated signing someone else’s ballot,” he wrote. “It’s also legal because each voter signed his or her own ballot.”

In a perfect system, all 11 would have been set aside, he said. Instead, only five failed to make it through.

So according to what he did, it is possible that slightly over half of the ballots accepted could have invalid signatures.

The article concludes:

Nevada voters had until Monday to resolve problems with mail-in ballots, a process known as curing.

Joe Gloria, Clark County’s registrar of voters, said that as of Saturday there were 14,651 uncured ballots in his county, of which 7,139 remained unresolved as of Saturday, according to The Washington Post.

Let’s just all go to the polls on election day like we used to. I would even allow one extra day, but I would not allow mail-in ballots. There is too much opportunity for fraud.

Will This Ruling Be Followed?

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In October I posted an article quoting The Epoch Times stating:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday vacated an appeals court decision that required Pennsylvania to count mail-in ballots even if there is no date on the envelope.

At the bottom of that article was a link to a Fox News article with the following headline:

Pennsylvania to count undated ballots, election official says, despite US Supreme Court ruling

On November 1, Townhall reported:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with an argument made by Republicans in their lawsuit seeking to prevent the counting of improperly completed ballots in next week’s general election, throwing out a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed PA election officials to count absentee and mail-in ballots that were not correctly dated and signed.

PA’s Supreme Court justices vacated the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision that would have allowed the counting of ballots that were not completed as the Keystone State election laws require, and ruled that the “Pennsylvania county boards of elections are hereby ordered to refrain from counting any absentee and mail-in ballots received for the November 8, 2022 general election that are contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes.”

The PA Supreme Court also in its ruling directed “the Pennsylvania county boards of elections segregate and preserve any ballots contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes” and noted that the “Court is evenly divided on the issue of whether failing to count such ballots violates 52 U.S.C. §10101(a)(2)(B).”

I want every legal ballot to be counted in this election. I want every illegal ballot thrown out and the people responsible for breaking the law put in jail. It is that simple. That is the way to end election fraud–send people to jail!

Moving Toward More Honest Elections

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Periodically I post articles that I do not understand. This is one of them. I am posting it because I think it is an important step to end some of the problems that we have had in recent elections.

On Tuesday, The Epoch Times reported:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday vacated an appeals court decision that required Pennsylvania to count mail-in ballots even if there is no date on the envelope.

“The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit with instructions to dismiss the case as moot,” wrote Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson (pdf), siding with David Ritter, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for a judgeship.

They also threw out a U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that allowed the counting of mail-in ballots in the race that Ritter had sought to remove because voters did not write the date on the ballots. Ritter lost his 2021 bid to serve on the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas after 257 mail-in ballots that didn’t have dates were counted.

Pennsylvania Republican legislators and conservatives filed amicus briefs saying the 3rd Circuit’s ruling threatened the integrity of the 2022 midterm elections.

But the Supreme Court’s action on Tuesday means that the 3rd Circuit ruling cannot be used as a precedent in the three states covered by this regional federal appellate court—Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware—to allow the counting of ballots with minor flaws such as the voter failing to fill in the date. Vacating the ruling does not change Ritter’s loss in his race.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article.

In the months preceding the 2020 election, many states altered their voting laws because of the fear generated during the Covid pandemic. Many of those laws were changed in ways that were not in compliance with the constitutions of their state. A number of court cases since the election (and some before the election) have reversed those changes and required the states involved to follow their own constitutions.

UPDATE:  Pennsylvania says it will ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling (article here).

Still Searching For The Truth

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On Tuesday, The Western Journal reported that the Arizona Attorney General’s Office sent a letter to the Maricopa County recorder and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors requesting the voter signature files along with other information.

The article reports:

The Election Systems Integrity Institute (ESII) released a report this month concluding that the Maricopa County, Arizona, mail-in ballot signature verification process used during the 2020 general election was deeply flawed.

The study, overseen by systems engineer Shiva Ayyadurai, found that the county allowed approximately 200,000 ballot envelopes with mismatched signatures to be forwarded for counting without further review.

Ayyadurai, who has multiple degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified last fall before the Arizona Senate regarding the findings of the Maricopa County 2020 general election audit.

That study resulted in the request. The article notes:

“In the study, it is alleged that over 250 of those sampled ballot affidavits on the envelopes to did not appear to match the voter’s signatures,” Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright, with the office’s Elections Integrity Unit, wrote in the letter.

The article also reports:

ESII researchers reported that 11.3 percent of the approximately 1.9 million mail-in ballots should have gone through the curing process, rather than the 1.31 percent that did.

That translates to more than 215,000 needing to be cured versus the “upwards of 25,000” identified by Maricopa County.

“I found it fascinating that they didn’t give us an exact number. They just said up to 25,000,” Ayyadurai told The Western Journal, noting the county called it a “rigorous signature verification process.”

The bottom line here is simple–we will never truly know who won the election. However, we need to do everything we can to protect election integrity in future elections.

 

Not Surprising

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There are still enough rumblings around about the 2020 presidential election to cause me to wonder if we will ever know the truth. Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about some new information that further indicates that there could have been massive cheating.

The article reports:

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) said on Friday that 82,766 mail ballots sent to voters in Wisconsin’s November 2020 presidential election “went missing or undeliverable,” a number more than four times greater than Joe Biden’s 20,682 vote certified margin of victory in the state.

More than 1.6 million votes were cast in the November 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, and Biden’s certified margin of victory was just 1.2 percent of all votes cast.

The article continues:

“83K mail ballots went missing or undeliverable amid 20k vote margin of victory in WI 2020 Presidential,” the headline read in a statement that accompanied the release of a report by PILF on Friday morning.

“We now know the cost of the rush to mail balloting – lost ballots. The federal data show the 2020 election had more mail ballots that were never counted than the margin of victory in the Presidential election in Wisconsin. This isn’t the way to run an election. Mail ballots invite error, disenfranchisement of voters, and puts the inept U.S. Post Office determining the outcome of elections,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in the statement.

The report showed that, unlike the results of the 2012 and 2016, the number of “missing or undeliverable” mail ballots in 2020 exceeded the margin of victory in the election to determine which presidential candidate would be awarded the state’s ten electoral college votes.

In 2020, for instance, 1.4 million ballots were mailed to Wisconsin voters, which was 86 percent of the 1.6 million votes cast. (emphasis added)

In 2005 the bi-partisan Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by Democrat President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican who served in the George H.W. Bush administration, analyzed the US election system and made recommendations to preserve election integrity.

The website pure integrity for Michigan elections notes the following:

The Carter Center, founded by the former president and first lady Rosalynn Carter, is affiliated with Emory University and promotes peace and democracy efforts globally and domestically. 

A Carter Center press release in May said the commission report “noted among its many findings and recommendations that because it takes place outside the regulated environment of local polling locations, voting by mail creates increased logistical challenges and the potential for vote fraud, especially if safeguards are lacking or when candidates or political party activists are allowed to handle mail-in or absentee ballots.”

“However, the Carter-Baker Commission found that where safeguards for ballot integrity are in place—for example in Oregon, where the entire state has voted by mail since 1998—there was little evidence of voter fraud,” the Carter Center statement continued. 

The commission’s main recommendations on vote-by-mail and absentee voting were to increase research on vote-by-mail (and early voting) and to eliminate the practice of allowing candidates or party workers to pick up and deliver absentee ballots.  

We need to look at the reforms the Commission recommended and put them in place.

We Need To Secure All Of Our Elections

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Yesterday KTLA Los Angeles reported that 300 election recall ballots were found in a vehicle where a felon was found passed out with drugs, a loaded firearm and multiple driver’s licenses one week ago, authorities said Monday.  How did 300 election recall ballots wind up in the same car? Obviously 300 ballots alone will not change the outcome of the recall election, but how many other questionable ballots are floating around the state?

The article reports:

Officers also discovered a loaded firearm, methamphetamine, thousands of pieces of mail, a scale, and multiple California drivers licenses and credit cards that were in other people’s names, a police news release stated. Xanax pills were also located on the unidentified male subject, who authorities described as a felon.

He was arrested on suspicion of a number of offenses, including weapons violations, narcotics and forgery violations.

Providing an update on the case Monday, police said the department’s Special Investigations Division has partnered with the U.S. Postal Service and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Offices Public Integrity Unit to look into the matter.

“Investigators are trying to figure out how the election ballots ended up in the suspect’s vehicle and what their intent was in having them,” police officials said in a statement. “This is an isolated incident and is not related to any additional thefts of election ballots.”

Why are the investigators so sure this is an isolated incident? If the person had multiple driver’s licenses, credit cards, etc., it is quite possible he was not working alone.

The article concludes:

No further details about the incident have been released.

The discovery came the same day that absentee ballots were mailed out to registered California voters for the upcoming Sept. 14 recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Any voter whose ballot was determined to have been taken in the theft will get a new one prior to the election, according to police.

They reminded community members to report any suspicious election activity by calling 310-328-3456.

All registered California voters may apply for an absentee ballot and vote by mail. Any registered voter may become a permanent vote-by-mail voter. Permanent vote-by-mail voters will automatically receive a vote-by-mail ballot for each election. Vote-by-mail is the place where most voter fraud occurs. By setting up a permanent vote-by-mail system, the state is opening the gate for voter fraud. If I move out of California and still have relatives there for a mailing address, I can vote by mail no matter where I live.

 

 

You Can Fool Some Of The People Some Of The Time…

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Hot Air reported yesterday that recent polls show that H.R. 1 is losing support among Americans.

The article reports:

Both House and Senate Democrats seemed to enjoy talking about how “popular” the COVID relief bill was every time a camera was pointed at them. (“Free money” seems to have that effect on people.) If they are so concerned about popularity polls when it comes to legislation, I wonder what they’re going to be saying about HR1, the “For the People Act.” Earlier this week we looked at one brutal poll showing that large majorities of people are opposed to some of the central provisions of the bill, including restrictions on voter ID laws and the continued expansion of mail-in ballots. Close on the heels of that survey, we now have a second poll from Scott Rasmussen and FreedomWorks on the same subject and the news for the Democrats isn’t getting any better. It seems that the more people learn about HR1, the less they like it. And this isn’t indicative of any partisan divide. Even Democratic voters are giving these proposals a major thumbs down. (Washington Examiner)

…In a new FreedomWorks/Scott Rasmussen survey provided exclusively to Secrets, 85% of registered voters said it is common sense to require photo identification to get a ballot. A previous survey from the unaffiliated Rasmussen Reports found 75% back photo ID.

But even more, 72% told FreedomWorks that photo ID laws boost their confidence in elections, and 52% believe it would reduce fraud.

The article concludes:

The widespread use of mail-in ballots and how they are handled also has large portions of the populace feeling uneasy. HR1 would require states to accept mail-in ballots up to ten days after the election. But 73% of the people surveyed said they believe that ballots should arrive by election day. As far as the HR1 requirement to mail out a ballot to every voter, 63% panned that idea, saying ballots should only be mailed to those who request them.

After all of the chaos surrounding the 2020 election and the mountains of mail-in ballots that election officials in most states were clearly not ready to deal with, is anyone surprised? Nobody wants to go through that again, but the Democrats are working overtime to make that a permanent fixture of American elections. In states that don’t put in any serious effort to clean up their voter rolls, those mass mailings led to any number of problems. That’s probably why a majority of respondents (57%) said they would “strongly favor” a law requiring states’ voter rolls to be regularly cleaned up.

Perhaps the most disturbing figure to come out of this poll is the one showing that 43% of the people surveyed had never even heard of HR1. The Democrats are trying to ram this through and the media is totally failing to educate voters on the specifics inside the bill. And if they manage to pass it, it will require the GOP to move mountains to undo the damage if and when they come back into power.

H.R.1 is not a stop toward election integrity and needs to fail miserably when voted on in the Senate. The “For the People Act of 2021” could be better described as the federalize election fraud act of 2021.

Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia Hold The Key

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Yesterday The Epoch Times posted an article (updated today) about some of the research into election fraud being carried out in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia.

The article notes a lot of irregularities in the voting in these states. I will try to highlight a few of them, but I strongly recommend that you follow the link above and read the original article.

The article reports:

Braynard (Matt Braynard, former data and strategy director for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign) assembled a team just days after the election to look for inconsistencies in six contested states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.

The group initially identified 1.25 million voter issues and followed up on them through phone calls and by cross-checking data against other databases.

The team ran several major analyses including of voters who had moved out of state but still voted in the state they had left; voters who registered to vote using a post office box number rather than a residential address as required; voters who requested a mail-in ballot and sent it in, only for it not to be counted; voters who didn’t request a mail-in ballot and didn’t receive one, but discovered a vote had been cast in their name; as well as research on people who voted more than once and on those who are listed in the death index.

One of Braynard’s biggest findings involved voters who had submitted a National Change of Address form to the post office, indicating they had moved out of state, yet appeared to have voted in 2020 in the state they moved from.

In Georgia, the team found 138,221 such people, which represents a much larger number than the state’s current vote differential (12,670) in the presidential race.

In Michigan, there were 51,302 such people; Wisconsin had 26,673, Nevada had 27,271, Arizona had 19,997, and Pennsylvania had 13,671.

…“The number of questionable ballots surpasses the vote margin in at least three states right now—Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin,” Braynard told The Epoch Times on Nov. 25. Those three states have a combined total of 37 electoral votes.

…Again in Georgia, Braynard found a further 1,000 people who registered to vote by using a post office box number, but attempted to disguise the box number as an apartment or suite number.

When registering to vote, by law, individuals must use their actual residential address as their residence. A P.O. box number can only be used as a mailing address. Homeless people can list a shelter, a soup kitchen, or even a parking lot as their residence.

…In Arizona, 44 percent of the people reached by phone said they hadn’t requested a mail-in ballot, despite the state receiving a completed ballot in their name.

In Michigan, that number was 24 percent; in Pennsylvania, 32 percent; and in Wisconsin and Georgia, 18 percent.

The article concludes:

Braynard said he hopes his findings will help bring greater scrutiny to the election process, in particular the verification process of mail-in ballots (he suggests fingerprints instead of signatures), clean voter rolls, and the availability of open-source voting machine data.

“It’s unfortunate, but short of a judge ordering a do-over, another election … short of that, I really don’t see how you fix this,” Braynard said.

“This election, it appears to me, has been decided by ballots that are highly questionable. They’re anomalous.

“I cannot say with confidence who won this election. I don’t think anybody can.”

I agree.

One Small Step Toward Election Integrity In North Carolina

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On September 4, 2020, The Carolina Journal reported the following:

A three-judge panel has rejected a plea to block absentee ballot witness requirements for North Carolina’s fall election. The decision in N.C. Superior Court generated praise from the state Senate’s leader on election issues.

“The judges were right to reject this dangerous attempt to eliminate basic protections against fraudulent activity that took place in the most recent federal election, and I hope they do the same with the multiple other lawsuits filed by Washington Democrats this year,” said Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, in a news release. Hise co-chairs the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Elections Oversight Committee. He also leads a Senate committee on election and redistricting issues.

The judges agreed not to grant a preliminary injunction in the case of Chambers v. State of North Carolina. Filed July 10 by four individual plaintiffs working with the American Civil Liberties Union, the case challenges an absentee ballot witness requirement in state law. The law requires one adult to witness an absentee ballot. It places limits on who can serve as a ballot witness.

The lawsuit alleges violations of four sections of the N.C. Constitution. But Judges Alma Hinton, Robert Bell, and Thomas Lock disagreed with the plaintiffs’ arguments. The judges found that “there is not a substantial likelihood” that the plaintiffs would win the case.

The article concludes:

“Washington Democrats sued to overturn an election security law passed with bipartisan support in the wake of widespread absentee ballot fraud uncovered in the 2018 Congressional election for North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District,” according to Hise’s news release.

“Witness signatures on absentee ballots helped uncover the fraudulent activity that took place in the 2018 Congressional election and is suspected to have taken place for many other elections before 2018,” the release continued.

“The court upheld the election integrity law that passed with broad bipartisan support after the NC-9 absentee ballot fraud,” Hise said.

Both state and federal courts have upheld the witness requirement, according to Hise’s release.

On September 1, I posted an article detailing some of the methods of voter fraud. Two of the targets of those who engage in voter fraud are absentee ballots and mail-in ballots. We do not need to do anything to make those ballots less secure, in fact, we need to do anything we can to make them more secure.

Myths vs. Truth

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On Tuesday The Daily Signal posted an article about the current lies being told about the U.S. Postal Service. It is a long and detailed article, so I suggest you follow the link and read the actual article. I will try to summarize it for you.

These are the 10 things we are currently being told:

MYTH No. 1: The Postal Service is removing sorting machines to sabotage delivery

MYTH No. 2: The Postal Service is removing collection boxes to block mail-in ballots.

MYTH No. 3: The Postal Service is locking collection boxes to prevent public access.

MYTH No. 4: The Postal Service could go bankrupt before the election without a $25 billion bailout.

MYTH No. 5: The Postal Service plans to triple postage rates on mailed ballots.

MYTH No. 6: Postal Service delivery changes are illegal “sabotage” by the postmaster general.

MYTH No. 7: The Postal Service needs more money to process mailed ballots.

MYTH No. 8: The postmaster general “massacred” Postal Service management.

MYTH No. 9: The Constitution requires a government-run Postal Service.

MYTH No. 10: The Postal Service loses money only because of unfair funding requirements.

The article debunks all of these myths with a healthy does of truth.

Here are a few of the realities:

The volume of mail has plunged in recent decades, due to the spread of electronic communication. As a result, the amount of infrastructure needed to manage the flow of mail also has declined.

…The Postal Service has more than 141,000 blue collection boxes spread across the country. Those boxes are moved regularly from low-demand to high-demand areas to maximize efficiency.

…Locked caps are sometimes put on collection boxes in areas where there is a rash of mail theft. Employees place the caps after the final pickup of the day and remove them in the morning, since collection box theft is overwhelmingly done at night.

…Although some were concerned that the COVID-19 pandemic would push the Postal Service over the financial edge, revenues have been stable, thanks to a big increase in package deliveries.

In addition, Congress provided a $10 billion loan to the Postal Service earlier this year.

…The Postal Service provided commonsense guidance to state and local governments regarding how to handle time-sensitive ballot requests. This guidance was already in the works before Postmaster General Louis DeJoy began his job.

You get the picture. Please follow the link to the original article for the rest of the story.