Vote By Mail - Potentially Fraudulent Or Fabulous

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To be honest, I miss going to the polls to vote. Even if it's just "virtue signaling" to myself, taking the time and "inconvenience" to go vote seemed important. Vote by mail became the norm in Washington State in 2011. As Newsweek reported this May, "before the pandemic struck the U.S., only five states—Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington—conducted their elections using a vote-by-mail system."

Some 16 other states required voters to provide reasons for requested absentee ballots but in current pandemic times, "those restrictions have been significantly relaxed over the past couple of months, with many states actively working to expand options for at-home voting in an attempt to limit foot traffic at polling places."

With all the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, presidential politics and voting, questions of potential voter fraud have surfaced. Is that crazy? Don't forget, President Obama said it was crazy to think the Russians could help rig an election. From a White house press conference in October of 2016 Obama said, “There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even — you could even rig America’s elections.....“There is no evidence that that has happened in the past or that there are instances in which that will happen this time. And so I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.”

And so he did.

But today, everybody left of dead center believes the Russians actually handed the election to Trump. So again I ask, is it crazy to think some kind of voter fraud could impact the November election?

NPR took a look at Vote by Mail, reporting, "Nationwide, the attitude toward mail ballots is also decisively positive. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that more than 70% of Americans think any voter who wants to vote by mail should be able to do so."

The President's take is that ," voters should be required to have a reason for voting absentee, otherwise the election process will become "substantially fraudulent."

NPR say President Trump's concern is misplaced and not backed by data. What is seen as a convenience and inclusionary by the left is feared as uncertain and open to illegal opportunism by the right.

In a Voter Fraud article from the Heritage Foundation, author Hans A. von Spakovsky writes that the mainstream media backs claims of voter suppression by the right while ignoring claims of voter fraud on the lef. "the media aren’t doing our democracy any favors by summarily dismissing the existence of voter fraud – like the almost 1,200 proven cases in the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database – while questioning the very need for accurate voter rolls.

The Pew Research Center has been looking at the potential for fraud for a number of years. A 2012 report revealed nearly 2-million dead people were registered to vote. Almost 3-million people were registered to vote in more than one state.

Pew also found that 24 million registrations were either invalid or inaccurate.

Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut – declared the goal of our election laws should be to “make it easy to vote and hard to cheat". Will the current Democrat scramble to implement nationwide vote by mail and ballot harvesting make it harder or easier to cheat?

Yakima County Auditor Charles Ross will join KIT's Morning News at 8:15 Tuesday (6/30/20) to talk about Vote By Mail. Join us!