After the 2020 Covid election, the Vermont legislature passed a law that mandates live general election ballots be mailed to everyone on the voter checklist regardless of whether or not the voter requests an absentee ballot. This raises, to put it mildly, concerns. Citizens need to be vigilant because, Lord knows, election officials are not. This is not intended as a slight. Many, if not most, of our clerks are doing the best they can, but our laws don’t give them any tools to detect mail-in ballot fraud.
When the ‘mail-out-all-the-ballots!’ law was being passed, the then Director of Elections, Will Senning, along with several town and city clerks, were asked point blank if person A came across another person’s ballot – someone who no longer lived at the address to which it was sent, a friend or relative who decided not to vote, a ballot snatched out of a neighbor’s mailbox or bought off of someone who’d rather have ten bucks – and person A filled out that ballot and signed the intended recipient’s name, there is no way for election officials to detect the fraud occurred.
If you want to see the video of Election Official testimony on not being able to detect mail in ballot fraud, Click the video link above.
That’s bad enough. But consider now that we are majorly reliant upon the US Postal Service for carrying out free and fair elections, and, well, let’s say our current postal system is (searching for a polite term) in disarray. It’s understaffed. In many cases, the employees on the job are new. Delivery is unreliable. And, perhaps worth mentioning, our state capitol hasn’t had a functioning post office for over a year. What could go wrong?
Listening to WVMT’s Morning Drive show today, a postal carrier (cannot be verified, but taking the caller at his word here) told the hosts that in the last election cycle, he came across hundreds of ballots sent to people who no longer lived at the address to which their live ballot was being delivered. This guy, so he said, was honest and returned them, but noted if he were not honest, he could have pocketed them all and determined on his own the outcome of multiple elections.
This is problematic for several reasons. The first is obvious. The opportunity is there for election scammers to collect unclaimed, unwanted ballots in large numbers to commit massive and, for all intents and purposes, undetectable fraud. Perhaps less obvious, postal workers are not in any official capacity election workers. They are not trained to be so. (Was it even legal for this postal worker not to deliver the ballot to the address where our election officials sent it?) They are not given any specific oversight in this role — they don’t even work for the state — yet they are the ones handling every one of our ballots, even if voters ultimately want to vote in person at the polls. Again, what could go wrong?
This year’s election poses another serious risk of exacerbating the problems with mailed ballots, and that is the massive, multiple, major flooding events our state has suffered over the past two years. Apart from damage to the infrastructure (again, Montpelier doesn’t even have a post office as a result), How many residents have been displaced by these disasters – in Barre, Lyndonville, Waitsfield, Ludlow, Johnson, Plainfield…. When your home experiences catastrophic damage, is your first thought really going to be that I better contact my town clerk and let them know I’ve moved?
On September 11, 2024, The National Association of Secretaries of State sent an open letter to the Postmaster General sending up warning flairs about the Postal Service’s state of unpreparedness for the upcoming election. It opens:
On behalf of state and local election officials in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories, we write to express our ongoing concerns about the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) performance as we approach the November 5, 2024 General Election. Over the course of the last year, election officials across the country have raised serious questions about processing facility operations, lost or delayed election mail, and front-line training deficiencies impacting USPS’s ability to deliver election mail in a timely and accurate manner. Despite repeated engagement with USPS Election and Political Mail headquarters staff and state/regional Managers of Customer Relations, we have not seen improvement or concerted efforts to remediate our concerns. In fact, many of the issues raised by election officials are echoed in the recent findings of the USPS Office of Inspector General Audit, Election Mail Readiness for the 2024 General Election. (Full Letter Here)
It was signed by thirty-three Secretaries of State. Ours, Sarah Copleand-Hanzas, is conspicuously absent. (Eye roll.) In her defense she was probably too busy replacing all of the experienced top-level staff in the Elections Division, Will Senning, Chris Winters, and JP Isabell, with newbies who have never done this before. So, there’s that little tidbit to worry about too!
Supporters of all mailed ballots on both sides of the aisle (there is bipartisan insanity on this issue, though it does lean left) claim the policy leads to higher voter turnout, and that’s good! Higher voter participation is good! But only if the system maintains “one person, one vote,” and not “one postal worker, 377 votes.” Or “one landlord, 24 votes.” Or “one corrupt campaign worker, who the hell knows how many votes.”
Turnout is the responsibility of us citizens. Maintaining an honest voting system in which it is easy to vote but verifiably impossible to cheat – and thus maintaining public confidence in the outcome of elections; something we need now more than ever – is the job of lawmakers. And in that job here in Vermont our lawmakers are failing us in a big way.
