In the early 1990s, I was a deputy prosecuting attorney for Whitman County. One of the interesting tasks of my position was to be a member of a panel certifying absentee ballots. The other representatives on the panel were the county auditor and a county commissioner. This was before voting by mail, so these ballots belonged to Whitman County voters who had requested to vote absentee, rather than in person.
There were never many absentee ballots at that time, perhaps 25 or so, and we would compare the signatures with the voters’ signatures of record. Because of the age or infirmity of the voter, their signatures were frequently awkwardly different from what was on file, but we could usually find enough common features to confirm the signature. A helpful factor was that generally, at least one individual at the table personally knew the voter, and was familiar with the reasons for why the voter needed to vote absentee. The work of certifying the few absentee ballots before us required an hour or more. In larger jurisdictions, the same signature scrutiny today might require weeks or months, or perhaps not even be possible.
John Fund is an American political journalist who was with the Wall Street Journal for more than 20 years and was also a member of its editorial board. He is a recognized expert on voting and voting fraud, and has written extensively on the subject. The point he has made in his writings is that the further you get from in-person voting, and the more people who have access to the ballot, the higher probability of error or fraud. Today, our mail (and ballots) is sent to distribution centers that may be 100 miles or more away, sorted, and then is delivered to its addressed destination. It is handled many times in this process, and ballots are not secured in voting lock boxes like you would see at the courthouse.
Supporters of voting by mail quickly state that there is little evidence that voting by mail leads to widespread fraud. Records unfortunately support this statement on a national scale as few instances of suspicious voting practices are ever investigated and fewer still are prosecuted. Universal voting by mail will result in ballots being mailed to every person on voting rolls that may not have been checked or purged in decades. While I was an attorney in Spokane years ago, I was defense counsel for a woman whose crime was stealing welfare checks from mailboxes on the day they were delivered. The same vulnerability exists for ballots circulating in the mail.
Many of you will remember the Washington gubernatorial race of 2004 where votes were counted three times. Twice, the Republican candidate won the count and each of these times, more ballots were suddenly produced. On the third count, the Democrat candidate received the most votes and the election was quickly declared over and certified. Depending on whose count was used, the deciding margin was either 129 or 133 votes.
I attended a meeting in Colfax, after the 2008 election, I believe it was, where a state legislator from Spokane was speaking. He said there was concern about a large number of votes coming from one Spokane address. The address was checked and it turned out to be a vacant house. Subsequently it was discovered there were other vacant, abandoned or “for sale” houses being similarly used. When the election of 2004 was decided by such a narrow margin, it doesn’t take many votes from vacant houses to change an election.
Insurrection and anarchy are currently taking place in a number of our major cities, and it is well funded, trained and organized. In Max Boot’s epic history of guerrilla warfare, “Invisible Armies,” Boot notes that although one man’s terrorist may be another man’s freedom fighter, it is the use of violence by nonstate actors directed primarily against noncombatants such as civilians, government officials, policemen, etc. The goal is to create political or psychological effects, not just destruction and violence. This leads us directly to the fall election cycle.
Universal voting by mail is an attractive and easy unconventional warfare target for the creation of election chaos, causing civil unrest and destabilizing society in general.
The November 2020 election will be a defining moment for America, and for that reason there will be great pressure to corrupt key races. If election integrity and American democracy are to be preserved, the nation should be returning to secure, in-person voting, not trending toward universal voting by mail. The latter is an invitation to error, fraud and the destruction of confidence in the democratic process of voting.
C. Barney Waldrop lives in Clarkston. He served 12 years on the Pullman City Council and is the former director of human resource services at Washington State University.
