![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2018\/11\/vote-14-1024x763.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Yes, I\u2019m going to talk about electoral fraud, and I use that phrase deliberately to imply something beyond mere \u201cvoter fraud\u201d which suggests merely voters committing fraud, rather than the officials accepting and tabulating the votes doing so.<\/p>\n
I will precede all of this with the statement that the best outcome of the election, given the alternatives, is that which we (likely) have:\u00a0 Biden as president and a GOP Senate to check his desires. But nonetheless: questions of potential fraud trouble me.<\/p>\n
Recall that for months we heard that Trump was \u201cbasically Hitler,\u201d and that the U.S. was at an existential crossroads:\u00a0 if Trump won the election, he would expand his control over the country to such a degree that we would never recover.\u00a0 Hundreds of thousands more Americans would die due to covid, People of Color would continue to suffer under systemic racism, their very lives at risk from murderous cops and S.A.-like Proud Boys, Amy Coney Barrett would single-handedly invalidate Obamacare and, well, you know the rest.\u00a0 Leftie Twitter accounts called for riots in the streets if Trump appeared to be winning, and businesses listened and boarded up their windows.<\/p>\n
Yet we are being told that, despite this insistence that the very future of the country was at stake, electoral officials applied rules for tabulating votes completely evenhandedly.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, we\u2019re being told this repeatedly \u2014 at least, those of us who use Facebook and Twitter are \u2014 that our elections are secure, full stop.\u00a0 THIS MUST NOT BE QUESTIONED, we are told repeatedly, and, indeed, the issue is turned upside down, and anyone who questions any element of the process is deemed to be subverting democracy.<\/p>\n
This is what angers me.<\/p>\n
Yes, it is the case that there has been very little in the way of proven voter fraud.\u00a0 But so much potential fraud is simply not provable. In states where mail-in voting is routine, there has been a real effort to keep voter rolls clean, so that ballots are sent to authorized voters, at their proper address, and nowhere else.\u00a0 \u00a0In Germany, in-person voting requires identification, and mail-in voting is based on registration with the local city hall \u2014 a concept that doesn\u2019t exist in the U.S. (and I can\u2019t speak of its prevalence elsewhere); everyone must register upon moving to a new home, and de-register when moving away.\u00a0 Oh, and also in Germany, all mailboxes, even at single-family homes, are secure, with locks, so your mail can\u2019t be stolen.\u00a0 And the entire process of managing mail-in ballots, from receipt to eventual tallying, is run without strong levels of oversight, so that reports of poll-watchers being denied access are especially concerning.<\/p>\n
And, again,\u00a0we\u2019re generally told that we must accept that, however much fraud occurs, it doesn\u2019t make a real difference.\u00a0 Elections such as Kennedy\u2019s win in 1960, where it\u2019s commonly believed, though not conclusively proven, that the Daley machine in Chicago put him over the top through fraud<\/a>, are meant to be overlooked in the name of political harmony, or, alternatively, to be seen as a vestige of a corrupt past that\u2019s otherwise as gone as Tammany Hall.<\/p>\n So consider these items:<\/p>\n In Pennsylvania<\/a>:<\/p>\n Just the News conducted a county by county review to determine the rejection rate of mail-in ballots by the state of Pennsylvania in 2020. The study found that only 0.036 percent of mail-in ballots were rejected this year compared to 1 percent in 2016.<\/p>\n \u201cMail-in ballots in Pennsylvania so far this year have been accepted at almost 30 times the rate predicted by historical rejection numbers,\u201d wrote Just the News\u2019 Daniel Payne.<\/p>\n Payne notes that only 951 of 2,614,011 mail-in ballots were rejected in 2020.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Is this fraud per se<\/em>?\u00a0 Maybe, maybe not \u2014 it depends on the meaning of \u201cfraud,\u201d I suppose.\u00a0 If a directive was given to loosen standards for accepting ballots, with the objective of advantaging Democrats because it was believed that valid votes were being discarded, is it fraud?\u00a0 If looser standards were adopted that meant it simply became impossible to distinguish between a valid vote and an invalid one (planned wide-scale fraud or opportunistic fraud of absentee ballots being returned by people to whom they were misdelivered, and refusal to compare signatures to prevent this), is it fraud?\u00a0 In any case, a recount would not affect counts where this sort of malfeasance had occurred.\u00a0 And the ballots have been co-mingled in such a way that there is no way to remove those votes now.<\/p>\n Separately, accusers of malfeasance in Pennsylvania<\/a> have said that Republican observers were blocked from being able to meaningfully observe the vote-counting, being kept 15 or more feet away from the counters.\u00a0 (Snark-ers say, \u201cthey could use binoculars,\u201d but they assert that it simply wasn\u2019t possible at that distance.)<\/p>\n In Michigan, four Republican poll-watchers and a city employee filed affidavits<\/a> claiming that, among other accusations, election workers backdated absentee ballots, accepted them without evaluating their validity, and even, \u201cwhen a voter\u2019s name could not be found\u201d in the Qualified Voter File (QVF) or supplemental lists, \u201cthe election worker assigned the ballot to a random name already in the QVF to a person who had not voted.\u201d\u00a0 The affidavits allege that city employees, at voting booths, coached voters into voting straight-ticket Democrat.<\/p>\n Perhaps these claims themselves are a misinterpretation of what was occurring, in the same manner as the transcribing of ballots into a machine-readable format was interpreted as fraud.\u00a0 Perhaps these people are themselves lying.\u00a0 The Detroit News<\/em> reports that <\/a><\/p>\n Besides the affidavits, no actual evidence of the alleged issues was presented.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But, of course, what sort of evidentiary standard could there possibly be other than witness\u2019s statements?\u00a0 Do we expect that there could be some sort of paper trail, a smoking gun set of instructions from a higher-up (\u201cTo: all election workers.\u00a0 From: senior election official.\u00a0 Re: maximizing Biden\u2019s lead through nefarious means.\u201d) which some subpoena or FOIA request could uncover?<\/p>\n There are more accusations coming out of Georgia, a link to which I can\u2019t find at the moment, that vote-counters declared, at 10:30 pm on election night, that they were shutting down, sending observers home, then continuing to count until 1:00 in the morning.\u00a0 Again, is it provable that votes were falsified during this time period?\u00a0 No, of course not.\u00a0 It\u2019s the nature of this sort of thing that it is not provable, other than some extremely improbable smoking gun.<\/p>\n And, again, there is no way to identify one way or another whether this sort of fraud, if it indeed occurred, would have swung the election.<\/p>\n But, again, the message of the Democrats, again and again, was that the very fate of the world hinges on Trump being defeated.\u00a0 It defies logic to say that despite the stakes being so high, pubic officials even in states\/cities with a long legacy of corruption, were, to a man, honest and trustworthy public servants doing their duty with the highest ethical standards.<\/p>\n But that being said:\u00a0 what\u2019s to be done?<\/p>\n Honestly, there\u2019s little that can, or even should<\/em> be done, with respect to the 2020 election.\u00a0 If improper ballots (that is, a ballot that should have been disqualified, or a wholly manufactured ballot) were accepted and commingled with the rest, a recount wouldn\u2019t solve the problem.\u00a0 It is likewise not practical to order a new election while the nation awaits the orderly transition of power in the same way as occurred, for example, for the 2018 North Caroline 9th Congressional District<\/a>, or that the entire electoral votes of a state be thrown out (a proposed remedy by the Trump legal team with respect to Pennsylvania).<\/p>\n With respect to 2022 elections?<\/p>\n I can conjure up a wishlist.<\/p>\n For in-person voting, photo identification should be mandatory, although the requirement should be paired with federal funds to ensure that poor\/rural Americans are able to acquire that ID, for example, through mobile ID-issuing offices visiting small towns in rural areas, fee waivers for state ID, etc.<\/p>\n For mail-in ballots, states should be required to ensure voter rolls are clean\u00a0so that they are only sent to people who still live at the address of their registration, they should ensure that signatures match, that each ballot is delivered to a secure mailbox (vs. left atop communal mailboxes at apartment complexes).\u00a0 Ballot-harvesting should be prohibited.<\/p>\n And all elements of the counting process should be fully transparent \u2014 no ballot deliveries in the middle of the night, no counting without observation.<\/p>\n But what happens when one of these \u201cshoulds\u201d are violated?\u00a0 There is no remedy at the moment for instances in which observers are denied access to vote-counting, other than a judge\u2019s declaration of \u201cdon\u2019t let it happen again,\u201d and a recount which, again, doesn\u2019t have any impact once invalid\/fraudulent ballots are commingled with valid ballots.<\/p>\n And this sort of legislation is always determined at the state level.\u00a0 What possible means is there to ensure any of these items actually happen?<\/p>\n Consider the Voting Rights Act of 1965, most recently renewed in 2006:\u00a0 it was struck down in 2019<\/a> because it used data from 1975 to determine which states, 40 years later, still needed \u201cpreclearance\u201d to make any changes to their voting legislation, whether that meant redrawing districts or even moving a polling place.\u00a0 \u00a0As the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a>,<\/p>\n The current coverage system, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, is \u201cbased on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCongress \u2014 if it is to divide the states \u2014 must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt cannot simply rely on the past.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n In response, Democrats introduced bills aiming to reinstate the law while complying with the Supreme Court\u2019s decision (regrettably, this PBS article<\/a> doesn\u2019t say exactly how, though based on the terms of the court decision presumably it would have to use more recent data to identify locations where voters are at risk of being deprived of their rights).\u00a0 Could Congress attempt a \u201cVoting Rights and Voting Security Act\u201d?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 The House\u2019s HEROES Act would have done exactly the opposite<\/a>, prohibiting voter ID requirements and mandating that states permit ballot harvesting. Would they agree to something to which they are not merely otherwise indifferent to, but actually object to?\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to see.<\/p>\n In other words, after a long stretch of typing that I had hoped would at least end with my proposing a grand solution and feeling at least a little bit better about the whole thing, but I don\u2019t.\u00a0 How about you?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, I\u2019m going to talk about electoral fraud, and I use that phrase deliberately to imply something beyond mere \u201cvoter fraud\u201d which suggests merely voters committing fraud, rather than the officials accepting and tabulating the votes doing so. I will precede all of this with the statement that the best outcome of the election, given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1468],"class_list":["post-17677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2020-election"],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n