Fear is being expressed that the Trump regime will put troops on the street to control the results of the 2026 midterm. So we have to call out the armed muscle, as if that makes a lie somehow true.. So, seeing streets patrolled by military on voting day(s) must mean...holy cow...there is a lot of fraud going on. There is not, and why that is so. The short answer: there is little fraud in voting because there is already a great deal of effort by Secretaries of State to employ and use technology to prevent it. However, there is still a nagging question raised by opponents of mail-in voting that is hanging around, making it easier to commit fraud.. Many believe that, but I surmise that is due to an ignorance of how the system works that feeds that fear.
There are a lot of questions about vote security and there needs to be a lot of voter education. Here are some of the questions that this post attempts to cover: How secure is your vote? Why is MAGA so opposed to mail-in voting? , Colorado is held up as the gold standard in mail-in votes How do you know if your ballot has been counted? What about poll watcher harassment? What about the military interfering in voting?
Why do MAGA and Trump hate mail-in voting? The assumption has been that the easier it is to vote, the more it favors the Democrats. That assumption was popular when the GOP was composed of the better-educated and older voters. The demographics have changed somewhat. MAGA is now the party of the less educated, and older voters have trended to be more liberal. There is still a persistent belief that the larger turnout favors Democrats, and voter participation is higher in mail-in states. For a time, in the 1980s, when I was an election official, it was the GOP pushing for mail-in voting,I suspect, mostly for the convenience of seniors who were heavily Republican. Colorado's system of mail-in voting was created by law in 2013, by a Republican administration with a variety of built-in safeguards against fraud.. Subsequent Democratic Secretaries of State have abided by those rules and laws.
There is another reason why I suspect Trump and his regime want to end mail-in voting. It has to do with the federal government controlling nationwide voting to its benefit. The most significant barrier is that, per the Constitution, the states, not the federal government, are in charge of voting. It is harder to interfere with voting when there are 50 individual states instead of a single federal system.
All voter lists and data are pretty much public records and accessible. However, those who would abuse them have a problem. Each 50 state has its own system and cybersecurity, and purges of lists are in the hands of thousands of county clerks and 50 secretaries of state. That means that so long as elections are not federalized, run from DC, we still have a fighting chance to hold the MAGA attempts to fix elections at bay. That mail-in ballots are such an enemy to MAGA is understandable. Every ballot is on paper, and no one can bully or scare off anyone at a polling place. It is easy to use the paper ballots to recount and prove irregularities.
I hope the answer is more mail-in... like Colorado. So long as the paper ballots are kept secure, they are the ultimate evidence of whether fraud was committed. The other disturbing piece is who controls the tally machine, or the polling place voting machines. Dominion Systems won a major liability-defamation victory, but it has now been bought by a MAGA-leaning company. That should be of great concern. Mail-in elections remove voting machines from the final equation and provide proof that the machine and electronic tally systems are accurate if a recount is called for. FYI... the chances of more fraud in mail-in ballots show a complete wilful lack of understanding of how the verification process works, primarily based on comparing signatures with those on record vs. the returned ballot. It is done at various counting stages. Clerks in Colorado have recently been sent to jail, fined, or relieved of election administration duties for breaking the machines' security protocols. Computers, these new-fangled systems, since the early 1980s, can also easily identify duplicate and deceased voters, as state death certificate records can provide corroborating evidence of such attempted fraud.
That the 2020 election was stolen is the mark of a true believer in MAGA and the litmus test to join the group. It is a MAGA pretext to make the case for federalizing elections. Election deniers have now been appointed to key positions in the DOJ. Here is the problem: A Conservative group finds "absolutely no evidence of widespread fraud" in the 2020 election. The myth persists, and no evidence has emerged that the 2020 election was stolen in the five years since. It is a pretext for a federal takeover of elections, an excuse for a loss.
More on "mail-in voting" .. Voting by mail and absentee voting | MIT Election Lab. Voting by mail and absentee voting | MIT Election Lab. This study, done in 2024, found that the incidents of election fraud are very rare, whether it is by "mail" or in person. "By mail" is a misnomer since in states where most voters get their ballots in the mail, they also return them in drop boxes and in their precinct polling places, or also return them by mail. The term "mail-in" should be about the method of returning a ballot for counting, not who gets a ballot in their hands to fill out. Nonetheless, the registration of voters, since in mail-in states like Colorado, is important since those registered will automatically receive ballots. How thoroughly they are vetted is critical and their applications are checked against duplicate and multi-state irregularities. The major advantage of all registration processes is that the signature of the voter is on record and used to verify that those who cast a ballot are indeed the registered person.
The process of maintenance of registration rolls and purging those who may only vote occasionally after a period is sometimes an issue of contention between political parties. Motor-voter registration to vote when applying for a driver's license is sometimes attacked by those who do not want greater voter participation in elections. They express bogus fears that there would be fraud, though all registrations are vetted, no matter where it was done.
Voter participation by "mail-in" is actually increased a little, but participation in voting for local offices shows a greater increase if "by mail". per the MIT study.One problem that critics of such" mail-in" voting raise is that if ballots are sent out only on request, then bad actors can request them without the voter knowing and vote more than once fraudulently.. There a few prosecuted cases like that mostly in the South per the MIT study.
What I note that is not addressed in the MIT study very clearly is that such "harvesting" happens when voters have to request an absentee ballot. However, states like Colorado and Oregon mail" mail-in ballots" to all registered voters to fill out at home if they wish. Who gets a ballot mailed to them is not an issue; the question is whether the returned ballot is secure and cast by a duly registered voter. All ballots are paper ballots, whether they are dropped off or mailed in, making it easy to recount and spot fraud if that becomes an issue in a recount.. All such" mail-in" ballots have signatures affixed on an envelope separate from the actual voted ballots, which are placed in a special secrecy envelope.. Clerks can compare the signature with signatures they have on file in their data registration banks as they receive them and discard those who are dead. Clerks are using state computer records of death certificates to continuously update their voter files.. Secretaries of State are also tapped into other states' data to eliminate duplicates of persons registered in more than one state. This process is ongoing and includes both in-person and "mail-in" voters. Both are subject to all of these kinds of scrutiny... This explains why the "2020 election was stolen" is so deceptive. Since security techniques are so effective, there is little evidence that elections could be stolen by enough fraudulent voters to make a difference. The greatest value is that if voters can avoid going to a polling place, armed paramilitary and national guards glaring down on anyone who is not white just will not work to suppress black and brown voters. It's all a show that "fraud is widespread' so we have to call out the armed muscle, as if that makes a lie somehow true..
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