Former state AG warns 'voting by mail' undermines democracy

 

A 2020 presidential ballot featuring President Donald J. Trump against Joe Biden (Photo by Joe Kovacs)
A 2020 presidential ballot featuring President Donald J. Trump against Joe Biden (Photo by Joe Kovacs)

A former state attorney general who now is part of a project investigating election fraud across the United States warns that “voting by mail” actually undermines democracy because of its potential for criminal activity.

And he’s citing the conclusions of a 2005 report authored by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in support.

Phill Kline was the attorney general in Kansas. Now he’s a law school professor and director of The Amistad Project, which is focusing on election fraud activities. It has reviewed a number of circumstances and several formal complaints have resulted from the 2020 race.

Kline wrote at Real Clear Politics that there are several problems with various voting methods.

“Some methods are not secure. Some methods are overly complicated. Some methods are not transparent. Any of these shortcomings is enough to undermine public confidence in the outcomes of our elections – and thus undermine our democracy itself,” he aid.

“Voting by mail,” he charged, “suffers from every one of those shortcomings. In 2020, the avalanche of nonprofit monies used to turn urban election offices into partisan turnout centers identified and exacerbated these flaws and the impact of legal violations.”

The Carter-Baker report, from nearly 20 years ago, said, “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

Kline said that conclusion is especially significant today – because of the unregulated explosion of “absentee and mail-in” voting during the 2020 election, where elections officials often simply ignored their own state laws regarding those methods purportedly to help cope with COVID.

“Blank ballots mailed to the wrong address or to large residential buildings might get intercepted,” was one warning from the 2005 commission.

“Fifteen years later, officials in numerous states weakened rules governing absentee ballots without legislative approval,” Kline explained.

He continued citing the Carter-Baker report, “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation.”

“That’s exactly what happened in Wisconsin in 2020, when the state’s Elections Commission suspended legal requirements for bipartisan Special Voting Deputies to oversee absentee voting in the state’s nursing homes. As a result, some of the state’s most vulnerable residents – including some with severe memory issues or cognitive decline, many of whom had not voted in decades prior to 2020 – say they were subjected to intimidation and coercion,” Kline explained.

Carter-Baker said, “Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail,” and it recommended states ban “third-party organizations, activists, parties, and candidates from handling absentee ballots.”

But Kline said, “In 2020 … states across the country embraced absentee ballot drop boxes, making it even easier for partisan activists to engage in ‘ballot harvesting’ by collecting absentee ballots of unknown legitimacy and depositing them in privately funded drop boxes, either under cover of darkness or while masking their faces.”

He pointed out that Carter-Baker wanted steps to make sure absentee ballots “are kept secure until they are opened and counted.”

But Kline said many states used “drop boxes,” which mostly ignored chain of custody standards for ballots.

“The 2020 election saw postal facilities turned into de facto vote processing centers. Despite the central role that U.S. Postal Service employees, contractors, and facilities played in the election – and the fact that the American Postal Workers Union endorsed Joe Biden – there was shockingly little oversight of the USPS. Bipartisan election observers were kicked out or relegated to the penalty box of arena-sized official vote counting centers, and were never even granted hypothetical access to the USPS facilities that processed tens of millions of mail-in ballots,” Kline explained.

“Is it any wonder that millions of Americans have concerns about the integrity of the 2020 elections? The left blames Donald Trump for this, accusing him of stoking ‘baseless’ fears about mail-in balloting, but in truth these concerns are not baseless, and they are not unique to Trump. Jimmy Carter and James Baker were expressing the same concerns back when Trump was hosting ‘The Apprentice,'” he said.

He also noted that Carter-Baker worried about the reliability of voting machines, and the ability to audit them somehow.

“Paper ballots, cast in person and counted by hand, are the gold standard,” he said. “They are accountable, transparent, and inclusive – the three conditions that the U.S. Agency for International Development applies when it evaluates the fairness of foreign elections.”

There remain many questions about the 2020 election, including multiple challenges that have been filed with elections commissions or in court.

What is known is that Mark Zuckerberg handed out $420 million in cash in local officials – purportedly to help them deal with COVID. However, the result often was a local elections office that actively recruited voters from Democrat districts and, according to one analysis, “bought” the election for Joe Biden.

There also was the fact states simply ignored their own legal requirements for absentee and mail-in ballots.

Further, there was a coordinated effort just days before the election by legacy and social media companies to suppress accurate, and damaging, reporting about the Biden family’s overseas business schemes and the millions of dollars that came in through those efforts.

A survey after the fact confirmed that that program, too, changed the results of the election from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

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