By Steve Levy
This week, President Trump issued an executive order to enhance the integrity of our election procedures. The proposals within it are desperately needed.
The complaints serving as the basis of the order are confirmed as being problematic in our Center for Cost Effective Government’s recently published analysis of the dilution of voting safeguards since the pandemic. Its findings are disturbing.
COVID-19 provided an excuse for political operatives wanting to expand the voter rolls with less oversight to maximize potential votes for their cause.
To accomplish this, they dramatically increased the use of mail-in voting, while simultaneously weakening signature verifications. In the 2020 election, 65 million mail-in votes were cast, compared to 33.5 million in 2016, a 94% increase. Meanwhile, the rejection rate of improper ballots dropped precipitously, from nearly 1% in 2016 to only 0.79% in 2020.
They also promoted ballot harvesting, where political operatives collected ballots from voters, and employed drop-off boxes, both of which severed the chain of custody between the voter and the elections board.
The mainstream media often claims that 2020 was the safest election ever. Don’t buy it.
There were numerous cases where rogue governors and secretaries of state unilaterally, and illegally, changed election laws.
The Constitution clearly states that only state legislators, and occasionally Congress, can change election law, yet the Secretary of State in Pennsylvania unilaterally settled a lawsuit, without state legislative approval, diluting signature verification. In another case, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, without legislative approval, extended the date on which ballots could be accepted.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to decide the case on the merits after the election, claiming it was moot. In fact, most legal challenges after the election were dismissed not because of insufficient proof, but rather, because of technicalities such as a lack of standing, lateness, or being moot.
Still, there were indeed some decisions stating these unilateral actions violated the law. The Wisconsin Supreme Court held that election board officials improperly allowed for 500 dropboxes to be placed without legislative approval.
In Michigan, a court ruled that the Secretary of State illegally provided guidance to local officials on how to verify signatures.
Other measures weakening election integrity included:
- Requiring only one election official to verify a signature, as opposed to two previously needed.
- No longer requiring the signatures on absentee ballots to match that on file with the elections board.
- Automatically registering residents to vote upon applying for driver’s licenses, often without proof of citizenship.
- Refusing to purge voter rolls of those registered who have died or moved from registered residences.
- Allowing some voters to correct their mail-in ballots, contrary to existing statutes, while denying others.
- Counting undated ballots.
- Improperly backdating ballots.
- Eliminating the need to list an address and a witness.
The left-wing media narrative claiming that concern about expanded mail-in voting is little more than a debunked conspiracy theory flies in the face of the 2005 commission headed by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, who concluded that absentee ballots are “the largest source of potential voter fraud.” It’s further refuted in that just about every other western democracy does not use mail-in ballots because of their experiences with past mail-in fraud.
America is also an outlier in using electronic voting machines. While these machines are not connected to the Internet, it is not difficult to doctor a machine within a particular precinct, as proven by a Michigan professor who showed a judge that he could manipulate the results with merely a BIC pen and a credit card.
This is especially important since elections are often turned just by a relative handful of votes. The entire 2000 presidential election was decided by a mere 500 votes in Florida.
We also warn against proposed Congressional legislation seeking to further dilute safeguards by barring states from requiring witness signatures on absentee ballots, banning any type of ID, requiring states to allow ballot harvesting and drop boxes, and forcing states to allow same-day voter registration.
Mail-in voting is especially concerning because many states have refused to purge their rolls of deceased voters or those who have moved. The Pew Research Center reported that, in 2012, one in every eight voter registrations, about 24 million people in the United States, “are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate,“ and that “more than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters.” Additionally, “approximately 2.7 million people have registrations in more than one state.”
Operatives with nefarious intent can seek a mail-in ballot online in the name of another and have the ballot sent anywhere so long as they have the address and the birthday of that individual. They can then simply sign and send it in. They’ll have a chance of it being accepted, as proven in an experiment from Victor Joecks, a Las Vegas Journal Review reporter.
Our report lists proposals that would stem the erosion of public confidence in the system:
1)…Videotape ballot counting.
2)… Match ballot signatures to signatures on file.
3)… Ban ballot drop-off boxes.
4)… End ballot harvesting.
5)… Require ID when requesting a mail-in ballot.
6)… Require and enforce two party oversight.
7)… Ballots must be requested, not mailed out indiscriminately.
8)… Purge the rolls of voters who have died or moved.
9)… Limit the use of electronic voting.
They can’t come soon enough, since surveys note that a remarkable 75% of Americans have concerns about election integrity.
Steve Levy is Executive Director of the Center for Cost Effective Government, a fiscally conservative think tank. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.”