Last week, six individuals were indicted in Queens County, New York , for absentee ballot mail fraud.
It is essential to understand that the only reason they were caught was that a voter whose name was improperly used by the suspects went to vote and discovered a vote had already been cast in his name.
That was the fatal flaw employed by the suspected scammers. If they were more sophisticated, they would have asked for ballots from individuals they knew were still on the voter rolls but had died or moved.
For professional scammers, it’s not all that difficult. A well-funded operation can cross-reference the county clerk’s offices to discover which individuals moved over the last few years and who died. Then they simply request an absentee ballot in the names of those people. Once the ballot arrives in the mail, they scribble down a signature and place it in a dropbox. Rarely is a ballot with a fraudulent signature disqualified.
I know this firsthand because I’ve been experimenting with this process. For the last several years, I have just been scribbling my name on the voter roll when I vote. The scribble looks nothing like the one on record in the book in front of the inspector. I’ve never been questioned.
In 2020, Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Victor Joecks cobbled together nine absentee ballots from acquaintances. He signed the names of the nine individuals in his own penmanship on separate paper. The voters thereafter traced over his penmanship to sign their names on their ballots. Consequently, the election boards were receiving ballots in the penmanship of the investigative reporter, not the voters. Astonishingly, eight of the nine were approved.
So the next natural question is: How many other bogus ballots prevailed in that election and others thereafter? The only honest answer is: We simply don’t know! And that is the main problem with absentee voting.
It’s the reason why European countries that flirted with the process abandoned it after experiencing unacceptable amounts of fraud.
In fact, there is hardly a Western European democracy that uses mass mail-in voting today. It is the United States that is now the outlier.
Why is it that there is no concern by the public in Europe as to whether their elections are being rigged? These countries have rejected electronic voting and still use old-fashioned paper ballots. Voters show up on Election Day to vote, and the winner is announced that very evening. The next day, everyone accepts the results, just like we used to do a decade ago.
Before you say this warning is coming from a Republican analyst, note the individuals indicted in Queens were Republicans. People desiring election integrity should shut down all potential fraud, regardless of which side of the aisle it may emanate from.
The current system is a magnificent recipe for voter fraud. And remember it doesn’t take a great deal of fraud to tilt an election. The margin of victory in the Queens race was 181 votes.
Add to this the fact that many states are automatically registering people to vote when they apply for a driver’s license. Illegal aliens in numerous states can receive such licenses. In the past, one would have to check off a box on a license application indicating that you wanted to register to vote, but now, in New York, you automatically become registered unless you opt out. How are inspectors at the elections boards to know that an illegal immigrant is voting if they were registered to vote by our government?
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How many of these individuals are being registered to vote? Again, we just don’t know.
We in the U.S. have perpetuated a system that has eroded the confidence of the public in the integrity of the system. That’s not good for democracy.
Steve Levy is president of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County executive, a New York state assemblyman, and host of The Steve Levy Radio Show. He is the author of Solutions to America’s Problems and Bias in the Media.
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