On Aug. 28, the Daily News published a column by C. Barney Waldrop in which he supported the idea that our country should rely on secure in-person voting. He claims that mail-in ballots are more susceptible to fraud.
His evidence is thin.
His main source is the writing of John Fund, who argues that our voting system is flawed to the extent that it threatens the existence of democracy. Fund cites as problems felons who vote, stuffing ballot boxes with fraudulent absentee ballots and, horrors, “universal voter registration,” which he claims is a reform but is already used in a half-dozen states and has not resulted in serious fraud.
Need I say that Fund is a Trump fan and probably is the source for Trump’s claim that mail-in ballots lead to fraud. One thing is for certain, the more people that vote, the less likely are Trump’s chances of winning. Of course he is against universal voter registration or mail-in ballots.
Washington state switched to mail-in ballots in 2005 and the result has been a grand success. Waldrop would say, yes, but there have been “few cases of suspicious voting practices ever investigated and fewer still are prosecuted.”
His support for fraud amounts to a case in which he was, “years ago,” a defense counsel for a woman who stole social security checks from mailboxes. Hence his conclusion that the mail is unreliable. Or, that a Spokane legislator said after the 2008 election that there was concern that a large number of absentee ballots came from one Spokane address, a vacant house, and that “other vacant, abandoned or ‘for sale’ houses (were) being similarly used.”
Mail-in voting would solve that problem. Waldrop’s last pitch for in-person voting is that mail-in voting would be an “easy unconventional warfare target for the creation of election chaos, causing civil unrest and destabilizing society in general.” That is a patented right-wing response. If anything, such thinking is wrong, unfair, and subversive and creates a vicious fear of a system that exists successfully in a dozen states in the United States.
In our Washington, we have safeguards in place. Only registered voters receive ballots, and they must sign their ballots. Can fraud take place? Of course, fraud is pervasive; why did Enron, or Lehman Brothers go bankrupt. There is a huge problem with fraud in America, and it is not only Steve Bannon who should go to jail for alleged fraud. The leaders of the National Rifle Association are currently accused of draining millions of dollars from their organization for their personal use.
Voter fraud, in the dozen or so states with mail-in ballots, may exist; no system is perfect. In Washington fraud is, according to our Secretary of State Kim Wyman, “very rare.” Just how rare? In the 2018 election, she stated, out of 3.2 million ballots cast, there were 142 cases of detected voter fraud. Her conclusion, that “we’ve seen a very low incidence of any kind of voter fraud,” is reassuring.
On the positive side, mail-in voting encourages people to vote, is quick and efficient, keeps people from long lines at voting booths, and especially in these times, saves all from exposure to the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus.
Nicolas Kiessling joined the Department of English at Washington State University in 1967. He is now retired and lives in Pullman.
