This Is A Good Idea

On Wednesday, Breitbart reported that the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of signature verification for mail-in voting in the state of Pennsylvania. Mail-in voting has been found to be one of the major sources of voter fraud in America. This is a step toward election integrity.

The article reports:

In a 2-1 ruling by three Democrat-appointed judges, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a previous ruling from a federal district court that struck down the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that required a “dated signature requirement” for mail-in voting. Per the RNC:

In November 2022, the RNC, NRCC, and PAGOP secured a victory on this issue in front of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. A federal district court then struck down the dated signature requirement in November 2023. We appealed, and now the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed with the RNC’s argument.

This was a 2-1 ruling handed down by 3 Democrat-appointed judges. This ruling will have far-reaching effects regarding left-wing attempts to weaponize the Materiality Provision of the Civil Rights Act across the country and represents a victory for mail ballot safeguards in a crucial swing state.

The article concludes:

Pennsylvania, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley hailed the decision as a “crucial victory for election integrity.”

“This is a crucial victory for election integrity and voter confidence in the Keystone State and nationwide. Pennsylvanians deserve to feel confident in the security of their mail ballots, and this 3rd Circuit ruling roundly rejects unlawful left-wing attempts to count undated or incorrectly dated mail ballots. Republicans will continue to fight and win for election integrity in courts across the country ahead of the 2024 election,” he said in a statement.

The case is PA State Conference of NAACP Branches vs. Secretary Commonwealth of PA, No. 23-3166 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

This is a positive step toward election integrity.

Voting In Person Works

On Monday, Hot Air posted an article with the headline, “Popularity of mail-in voting plummets in 2022.” One can only hope that it stays unpopular in 2024. I recently watched the movie “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza. I don’t claim to understand all of the technology involved, but the movie makes a good case for the fact that there was massive ballot drop box fraud in the 2020 election.

The article at Hot Air notes:

Even with all of the chaos that was seen in 2020 because of massive amounts of mail-in voting during the pandemic, congressional Democrats have continued to push “voting reform” bills that make it permanent on a federal level. We were repeatedly assured that too many people were having a hard time voting, and ubiquitous voting by mail would boost participation because people simply like it better. They may want to take a fresh look at that theory following the first rounds of primary voting heading into this year’s midterms. While total turnout has been fairly typical or even slightly elevated thus far in the early voting states, the Associated Press finds that the lion’s share of votes cast thus far have been in person. By contrast, the number of people opting to mail in their ballots has sunk like a stone. This is starting to look like yet another case of the Democrats failing to read the room.

…The five states where primary voters put this theory to the test were Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska, and West Virginia. Numbers are not yet available for Nebraska, but the other four showed a decisive trend. In Georgia’s primary in 2020 there were almost one million people who voted by mail. This year, 85,000 requested mail-in ballots. That’s not even one-tenth of the previous primary numbers. And it’s still not known how many of the ballots that were mailed out were actually returned, but obviously, not all of them were.

The ratios in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia were similar. While we saw a flood of mail-in ballots during the lockdowns, that number has returned to a trickle. Granted, the states who have voted already were mostly red-to-purple states. Perhaps the percentage will be higher in some of the upcoming blue states. But I’ll be deeply shocked if any of them see even half the number of mail-in ballots that they did two years ago. Of course, that tide could still turn in the other direction. Some analysts that the AP spoke to suggest that it’s just too soon to say.

The article concludes:

In-person voting is the norm. It’s always been the norm and it needs to continue being the norm. It’s far easier to conduct a recount (if required) when all of the physical ballots are submitted straight from the voter’s hand in a centralized location for each precinct. The more boxes, bags, and hands of “agents” a ballot has to pass through, the less confidence the voters will have in the outcome.

On November 20, 2020, The Daily Signal reported:

They (the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, known informally as the Carter-Baker Commission) called on states to increase voter ID requirements; to be leery of mail-in voting; to halt ballot harvesting; to maintain voter lists, in part to ensure dead people are promptly removed from them; to allow election observers to monitor ballot counting; and to make sure voting machines are working properly. 

They also wanted the media to refrain from calling elections too early and from touting exit polls. 

All of this may sound eerily similar to the issues in the prolonged presidential election battle of 2020. But these were among the 87 recommendations from the 2005 report of the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, known informally as the Carter-Baker Commission. 

The bipartisan commission’s co-chairmen were former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican who served in the George H.W. Bush administration. 

If only we had listened.

What Is The Relationship Between These Two Stories?

On January 18th, Reuters posted an article reporting that President Biden will extend the U.S. national emergency declared in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The national emergency would have expired on March 1.

The article reports:

The emergency would have been automatically terminated unless, within 90 days prior to the anniversary date of its declaration, the president sent a notice to the Congress stating it is to continue beyond the anniversary date.

Biden’s step to extend the emergency comes even as a slew of local leaders in the United States are dialing back pandemic restrictions as the Omicron wave ebbs. read more

The governors of New York and Massachusetts announced last week that they would end certain mask mandates in their states, following similar moves by New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Delaware and Oregon.

U.S. health officials said earlier this week they were preparing for the next phase of the pandemic as Omicron-related cases decline.

On Friday, The Conservative Treehouse reported:

Joe Biden informed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that he intends to extend the federal National Emergency declaration beyond its termination date in March. [STATUTE HERE]

By statute the State of a National Emergency expires one year after initial declaration. That meant the COVID National Emergency declaration was scheduled to end March 1st.  However, the statute allows the extension if the executive office informs the legislative branch within the 90-day window prior to expiration.

Biden informed Nancy Pelosi today of his intent to extend the National Emergency.  Both the House and Senate will now have to schedule a vote to support the extension [SEE HERE]:

It is encouraging to me that Congress has to vote on the extension. It is possible that the emergency declaration will be used against any American truckers protesting vaccine mandates (as in Canada), but it is also possible that the declaration will be used to justify extensive mail in voting in the mid-term election.

Townhall reported the following on Wednesday:

Weeks ahead of the state’s March 1 primary, local election officials in Texas are sending mail-in ballots back to thousands of voters who had turned them in, citing issues with ID requirements created by the state’s controversial new voting law.

In Harris County — Texas’ largest county, which is home to Houston — election officials said they’d received 6,548 mail-in ballots as of Saturday and had returned almost 2,500 — nearly 38% — for correction because of an incorrect ID.

That’s a far higher rejection rate than is typical.

[…]

Voting for the March 1 primary that is currently underway in Texas is the first big election held in the state since Senate Bill 1, a GOP-backed law that introduced sweeping changes to the Texas election code, went into effect.

[…]

Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications, says a Texas voter who is already registered can update their registration online — even after the registration deadline — on a new website the state created to make sure it has all the IDs the voter uses.

“You are not changing anything by adding information to your voter registration record, you are just making it more complete,” he says. “So that doesn’t start the clock over in terms of whether or not you were registered by the deadline for the March primary.”

Now stop and think about what is happening in Texas for a moment. Texas has put in place laws that will help protect the integrity of mail-in ballots. Many other states have not. If America is in a state of emergency, can that state of emergency be used to justify universal mail-in ballots? If you were a Democrat looking at the polls, would you be looking for a way to win?

On April 10, 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported:

‘Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That quote isn’t from President Trump, who criticized mail-in voting this week after Wisconsin Democrats tried and failed to change an election at the last minute into an exclusively mail-in affair. It’s the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III.

Concerns about vote-buying have a long history in the U.S. They helped drive the move to the secret ballot, which U.S. states adopted between 1888 and 1950. Secret ballots made it harder for vote buyers to monitor which candidates sellers actually voted for. Vote-buying had been pervasive; my research with Larry Kenny at the University of Florida has found that voter turnout fell by about 8% to 12% after states adopted the secret ballot.

Please follow the links to all the articles mentioned to get the complete picture.

 

About That Mail-in Voting Idea

The Daily Wire posted an article yesterday listing some of the problems already encountered with mail-in and absentee ballots during this election.

The article reports:

The U.S. Postal Service has reportedly launched an investigation after mail—including absentee ballots—were discovered this week along a road in the swing state of Wisconsin.

“According to the Outagamie County Sheriff’s Office, three trays of mail were discovered shortly before 8 a.m. Monday in a ditch along State 96 at Outagamie county CB in Greenville,” the Post Crescent reported. “The mail was on its way to the post office and the sheriff’s office turned it over to the postal inspector. The mail was mixed and did contain ‘several’ absentee ballots.”

In another instance:

The news comes after federal law enforcement officials discovered that some military ballots had been discarded in the swing state of Pennsylvania and that out of all the discarded ballots that had been opened, they all had voted for President Donald Trump.

“The FBI has recovered a number of documents relating to military ballots that had been improperly opened by your elections staff, and had the ballots removed and discarded, or removed and placed separately from the envelope containing confidential voter information and attestation,” U.S. Attorney David J. Freed said in a letter to Shelby Watchilla, Director of Elections of Luzerne County Bureau of Elections.

“Specifically, a total of nine (9) military ballots were discovered to have been discarded,” the letter continued. “Seven (7) of those ballots when discovered by investigators were outside of any envelope. Those ballots were all cast for presidential candidate Donald Trump. One (1) of those seven (7) ballots was able to be identified to an envelope that was recovered, and thereby potentially tied to a specific voter. Two (2) military ballots that had been discarded were previously recovered by elections staff, reinserted into what appeared to be their appropriate envelopes, and then resealed. Therefore, the votes cast on those two (2) ballots are unknown. Thus, is appears that three (3) of the nine (9) recovered ballots can be potentially attributed to specific voters. Six (6) of the ballots were simply removed and discarded, and cannot be attributed to a specific voter at this time.”

Yet another instance:

Also on Thursday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced more than 100 felony charges in an illegal ballot harvesting scheme in a Democrat Primary.

“It is an unfortunate reality that elections can be stolen outright by mail ballot fraud. Election fraud, particularly an organized mail ballot fraud scheme orchestrated by political operatives, is an affront to democracy and results in voter disenfranchisement and corruption at the highest level,” Attorney General Paxton said in a statement. “Mail ballots are vulnerable to diversion, coercion, and influence by organized vote harvesting schemes. This case demonstrates my commitment to ensuring Texas has the most secure elections in the country, and I thank the Gregg County Sheriff and District Attorney for their continued partnership. Those who try to manipulate the outcome of elections in Texas must be held accountable.”

We need in-person voting with voter id. Note that Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are both considered swing states.

How Voter Fraud By Mail Works

On Saturday, The New York Post posted an article exposing how mail-in voter fraud works.

The article reports:

Mail-in ballots have become the latest flashpoint in the 2020 elections. While President Trump and the GOP warn of widespread manipulation of the absentee vote that will swell with COVID polling restrictions, many Democrats and their media allies have dismissed such concerns as unfounded.

But the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception. His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.

“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”

The article explains the method used:

The ballot has no specific security features — like a stamp or a watermark — so the insider said he would just make his own ballots.

“I just put [the ballot] through the copy machine and it comes out the same way,” the insider said.

But the return envelopes are “more secure than the ballot. You could never recreate the envelope,” he said. So they had to be collected from real voters.

He would have his operatives fan out, going house to house, convincing voters to let them mail completed ballots on their behalf as a public service. The fraudster and his minions would then take the sealed envelopes home and hold them over boiling water.

“You have to steam it to loosen the glue,” said the insider.

He then would remove the real ballot, place the counterfeit ballot inside the signed certificate, and reseal the envelope.

“Five minutes per ballot tops,” said the insider.

The insider said he took care not to stuff the fake ballots into just a few public mailboxes, but sprinkle them around town. That way he avoided the attention that foiled a sloppy voter-fraud operation in a Paterson, NJ, city council race this year, where 900 ballots were found in just three mailboxes.

“If they had spread them in all different mailboxes, nothing would have happened,” the insider said.

…“You have a postman who is a rabid anti-Trump guy and he’s working in Bedminster or some Republican stronghold … He can take those [filled-out] ballots, and knowing 95% are going to a Republican, he can just throw those in the garbage.”

In some cases, mail carriers were members of his “work crew,” and would sift ballots from the mail and hand them over to the operative.

In 2017, more than 500 mail-in ballots in New York City never arrived to the Board of Elections for races that November—leaving hundreds disenfranchised. They eventually were discovered in April 2018. “For some undetermined reason, some baskets of mail that were bound to the New York City Board of Elections were put off to the side at the Brooklyn processing facility,” city elections boss Michael Ryan said at the time of discovery.

The article continues with details on how those intent on voter fraud target nursing homes and states without voter ID laws. Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is frightening to know that this has gone on for years. It is time for voter fraud to end.