Ross: Voter fraud is about corruption, not mail-in ballots
May 22, 2020, 8:07 AM | Updated: 10:25 am
(KIRO Radio, Matthew Pitman)
The states of Michigan and Nevada are considering giving all their voters the option of voting by mail in November, just in case the virus is still out there.
That prompted President Trump to threaten to hold up their federal grants, on the grounds that mail-in ballots could be faked.
Now, voting by mail is not perfect. In the 2018 election in Washington state, which is 100% vote-by-mail, investigators did find 142 suspect votes … out of 3.1 million ballots.
But there was no organized attempt to rig the election.
Whereas yesterday, we learned of a clear attempt to rig several elections in Pennsylvania. In three Philadelphia elections, an elections official took bribes to inflate the vote counts for certain Democratic candidates. But Pennsylvania is not a vote-by-mail state. According to the U.S. attorney, here’s what the guy did:
“He would add the fraudulent votes by literally standing in the voting booth and voting over and over and over again,” he described.
So, how easy was that, right? Fraud has nothing to do with the mechanics of voting – it’s about corruption.
But the problem with elections isn’t even fraud: It’s lousy turnout. In his best year, that Philadelphia fraudster cast all of 46 bogus votes.
If all the legal voters who could vote did vote, guys like him would just be wasting their talents.
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