OPINION:
Balloting in the tumultuous 2020 presidential contest was the “most secure in American history,” as we have been told over and over.
New evidence, however, casts a bit of doubt on the security of the election that ended up replacing Republican President Donald Trump with Democrat Joe Biden.
A Heartland/Rasmussen Poll published last week asked a sampling of voters whether they actually followed the rules as coronavirus fears drove some Americans to avoid polling places in favor of the postal alternative.
Among the key findings: 21% of mail-in voters said they filled out a ballot for a family member or friend, 17% said they voted in a state where they no longer lived and 8% claimed they were offered “pay” or a “reward” for their vote.
All such acts are illegal.
Commenting on the findings, Heartland Institute President James Taylor wrote: “If you don’t protect the integrity of the election process and every single ballot, the franchise means nothing and we no longer live in a society governed by the actual will of the people.”
It’s hard to disagree.
Nationwide, 158.3 million votes were cast in 2020, with 43% of voters mailing their ballot rather than voting in person, according to the Election Assistance Commission. Mail-in votes across the country totaled about 68 million.
If, as the poll found, 1 in 5 ballots cast were technically void for having been completed by a family member or friend, then invalid ballots totaled in the millions for that reason alone. That’s a lot of potential for mischief.
By comparison, President Biden’s combined margin of victory in four key battleground states was a mere 81,000 votes. And Mr. Biden would be the primary beneficiary of any chicanery, as 58% of Mr. Biden’s voters used mail-in ballots versus 32% of Mr. Trump’s voters.
Given the absence of safeguards against invalid mail-in ballots, it’s safe to assume Mr. Biden would be an octogenarian retiree today rather than an octogenarian president had the pandemic rule changes not been implemented.
Knowing this, the Democratic Party has no intention of surrendering the quantitative advantage it has gained from the newly lax procedures. In recent months, party lawyers have managed to deflect new voter identification rules in Texas and Georgia, and they sued Nevada earlier this month to block a referendum on a new photo ID requirement.
Shaken by defeat, some Republicans have adopted the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach, hoping to out-mail their Democratic foes. They certainly have a point in doing so, but voters can be forgiven for suspecting that the election will go to the party that can pad its totals with the most fraudulent ballots.
When a prominent socialite, Eliza Willing Powel, asked whether the new American government would take the form of a republic or monarchy, Benjamin Franklin famously responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
If mail-in malfeasance is here to stay, then it’s likely we cannot.
