OPINION:
A new survey from The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports found that roughly 20 percent of voters who mailed in ballots for the 2020 political races committed some sort of election fraud.
The takeaway is not to tighten mail-in balloting rules. The takeaway is to ban mail-in voting except in the most extreme and necessary of circumstances.
As Jim Lakely, vice president and director of communications for Heartland, said in a telephone interview: Even France doesn’t allow mail-in balloting.
So why should America?
The rules of voting were tossed to the side during the coronavirus — to great detriment to America’s election integrity.
Among the findings of this survey: Fully 17 percent of mail-in voters said they voted in 2020 in a state where they were “no longer a permanent resident”; 21 percent said they filled out a ballot for a friend or family member; and another 17 percent said they signed a ballot for a friend or family member “with or without his or her permission.”
That — as a record-breaking 43 percent of all 2020 voters sent in their ballots by mail, Heartland found.
“Mail-in voting — often called absentee voting or vote-by-mail — has slowly but steadily gained in popularity in the United States,” Pew Research Center reported in October 2020, amid the COVID pandemic. But even before COVID, the safeguards of America’s electoral system were crumbling.
From Pew: “Mail-in ballots accounted for just over half of this year’s primary votes cast in the 37 states (plus the District of Columbia) for which data is available,” Pew wrote. That’s about double the previous general election years. But the previous general election years’ totals for mail-in ballots were still significant.
In 2018,” Pew went on, “27.4 percent of the 85.4 million general-election votes in … 38 jurisdictions were mail[ed] ballots. In the 2016 general election, 24.9 percent of that year’s 96.8 million were.”
This is astonishing for a nation that’s supposed to lead the world in terms of liberty. How can there be liberty if elections are a sham?
Democrats love the mail-in system, as well as the abandoning of Election Day for elections days; election weeks; election month; election whenever. It opens the door for fraud, yes; but after all, that is the basic winning formula for Democratic Party candidates.
Know what else Democrats love? Open borders. And it’s no coincidence that borders have swung wide open under this Joe Biden presidency; his falling favor with the American people is leaving Democrats desperate, particularly since COVID is no longer, and particularly since some states have tightened election laws since 2020. So their logic is: If they can’t mail in the fake votes, perhaps they can generate some illegal voters.
“Nearly Two-Thirds See ‘Invasion’ at U.S.-Mexico Border,” Rasmussen Reports also found in a separate poll.
That survey found 70 percent “of voters consider border security a vital national security interest for the United States these days” and 72 percent believe the current situation at the U.S.-Mexico border is a crisis,” Rasmussen wrote.
It’s a double-whammy of disaster for America’s election systems: Open borders plus easy-peasy mail-in balloting equals votes for Democrats. The two go hand-in-hand. If America’s conservatives don’t fight against mail-in balloting with the same vim and vigor they call for law and order at the border, then elections won’t matter; voters won’t matter. Democrats will hold political power in perpetuity.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
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