Those in America trying to dilute the safety of the voting process are at it again. In New York, Democrats are attempting to rewrite a state law to allow for a vast increase in mail-in voting, despite the fact that voters soundly rejected the same proposal via a referendum just two years ago.
The weakening of voting integrity is being championed by New York State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris of Queens. Gianaris is a bright, ambitious progressive who came into the state Legislature the same year I did in 2001.
He quickly elevated through the ranks to become an effective legislator, and a fierce partisan operative.
It was Gianaris who was behind the attempt to redraw legislative district lines in 2020 to benefit the Democrats in such a blatant manner that it was ruled unconstitutional and thrown out by the state’s highest court.
Gianaris lost that battle, which resulted in four Democratic seats switching to the Republican column and helping the GOP take control of the House. But Gianaris came back fighting and orchestrated a coalition of progressive union leaders and other lefties to block Governor Kathy Hochul’s moderate choice to serve as the Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals. He was successful in getting a far-left judge, Rowan Wilson, to lead the court, and is now, after a New York appellate court ruling last week, is in the process of redrawing those district lines to once again favor Democratic candidates.
But as noted above, this wasn’t the first end run that Gianaris was involved in. He is also leading the charge to push mail-in voting down the throats of New Yorkers, even though they don’t want it.
It’s no wonder that Democrats want to move aggressively to make massive mail-in balloting the norm. They have profited greatly via the nebulous nature of the mailed-in ballot.
Their goal is to remove the requirement that an individual show up in person so that they can have their operatives knock on their doors through a ballot harvesting campaign and collect the ballots and submit only those ballots they know will fall into their column.
Think about all the tens of thousands of additional votes that can be derived by Democratic operatives going into high-density housing complexes in Democratic precincts and suggesting voters “check the box right here.”
Or heading into nursing homes and having the vulnerable elderly sign and check off ballots in their presence. There’s a reason this odious practice is banned in so many states. The potential for fraud, malfeasance and intimidation is immeasurable.
Imagine we heard that, for the first time, the Cuban government was going to allow for supposedly free and fair elections. However, the Communist Party noted that they would send their personnel door-to-door to collect the ballots. Objective ballot overseers would be outraged at such a flawed and potentially corrupt process. Yet, Democrats are pushing for the same horrific system to become the norm here in America. In fact, in Nancy Pelosi’s HR-1 submitted to Congress a few years ago, ballot harvesting would be legalized and federalized throughout the entire country.
They wish to combine this with a massive flooding of the electorate with ballots, even where they’re not requested. That means we could have more ballots circulating than actual voters. That’s a big deal.
It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which operatives compile a list of voters who died over the last five years. Chances are, their names are still in the books because Democrats have balked at purging the ballots of dead people, or people who moved from their pre-existing addresses.
Can cheaters now take these plentiful ballots floating around the electoral universe, sign the name of these dead people and mailed them in with no accountability? Ah, but you say, the signature verifiers will easily catch it. Think again.
A test case conducted by Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Victor Joecks, illustrates how shaky the process is. https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-joecks/victor-joecks-clark-county-election-officials-accepted-my-signature-on-8-ballot-envelopes-2182390/
He was contacted by nine people who said they received ballots at their homes addressed to people who were either dead or no longer living there. Joecks had the ballots filled out and signed the residents’ names with his signature. Wouldn’t you know that eight of the nine bogus signatures were accepted?
Which begs the question: How many others like this were legitimized throughout the nation? The point is, we don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why a panel comprised of former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in 2005 issued a report warning the American public that mail-in voting poses the greatest threat to electoral integrity in our nation.
The retort by Democrats and the mainstream media is that there is little to no evidence of fraud. That’s not necessarily so since one can just look at the Heritage Foundation’s website for over 1,000 such examples. https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/election-fraud-database-tops-1400-cases
But even if we can say that the amount of fraud is relatively small, that in and of itself should not end our concerns. We all know of numerous elections that are turned by just a handful of votes. In the presidential election, of the 130 million votes cast, it was a mere 50,000 in just three states that made the difference.
There is a reason European democracies have rejected mail-in ballots, and do it the old-fashioned way with people showing up to vote on one day, and having the results declared that same day. Rarely, if ever, do we hear of a debate as to the final outcome. That is so essential in a democracy.
But ballot harvesting, mail-in voting, and other chicanery played by Democrats, throughout Covid and beyond to weaken our election laws, have placed doubt in the hearts of at least half of America about the integrity of the system. And that is a recipe for disaster.
Americans are fair-minded people who will accept the loss at the ballot box and move on to fight another day. But when they believe that the system is deliberately being weakened to help one side of the aisle, they will rebel, and that will cast doubt on the ultimate winner.
This has nothing to do with Donald Trump. He lost by 7 million votes in the popular contest which would make it extremely hard to overcome, even with the slim margins on the electoral side.
But whether or not you buy into Trump’s often exaggerated claims, there is a problem moving forward with mail-in voting. That’s why the people of New York said “no” resoundingly in a referendum trying to validate expanded mail-in voting.
How un-American it is for New York Democrats to not only push for a dilution of voter integrity, but to do so against the will of the very people they represent.