- Who really needs absentee/mail-in voting and fraud
- A Texas law to stop fraud and a lawsuit to protect it
- Chain of custody – Show up. Fill it out, hand it in
- Postal service barcoding and chain of custody
- Other chain of custody issues – after the election
- Get off your ass
Depending on which AI you believe, fewer than 7 voters out of every 100 actually need to use vote by mail or an absentee ballot. Truly and absolutely need it and are, in fact, eligible to vote in the first place. As few as 1% to as many as 7%. Enough to move the election needle, but there’s no good excuse for the rest of us to do anything other than get our ass to the polls and vote in person.
“Democracy” being so damn important, and all that.
I was reminded of this after I tripped over a 5th Circuit Court ruling. Texas passed a law in 2021 to stop all the mail-in ballot fraud, which every nation on earth and plenty of democrats have admitted is the easiest way to engage in that sort of fraud. 2021, of course, following 2020, when a demented cabbage miraculously “gathered” more votes than any presidential candidate in history, including the Hopey Change half-black magic negro.
There are plenty of Democrats not named Obama who said No F-ing way but had to keep their yaps shut. Not something they need to do when they lose under suspicious circumstances to a Republican or even another Democrat. Fraud is rampant and real, and dammit, they demand justice.
I’m not sure what they said to Hong in Wisconsin to get her to keep her opinion to herself, but a Democrat stole that election from a bunch of Democrats, and no one is supposed to make a scene. That’s got to be difficult since making a scene is one of the few things Democrats are any good at.
Texas?
The law in question attempted to curtail any behavior that might improve the odds of fraud. Something legislatures are supposed to do but that Democrats overwhelmingly despise, and that’s not supposed to be suspicious either.
The restored rules include requirements for Texans voting by mail to provide an identification number or Social Security number on ballot applications and for that information to match state records. The law also lays out a process for voters to fix defective ballots and requires voters and people helping them fill out ballots to sign an oath stating they did not coerce the voter.
All 1-7% of the people who might actually need to vote from a distance. A number we could grow a smidge if we include travel or deployment, but one that doesn’t change much since a lot of people never vote, which pleases the left because they won’t be voting against them.
Here’s where the sermon starts again. If you can vote and you want to make sure your vote is counted, even if it’s by a machine using a paper ballot, your ass needs to get there, fill it out, and hand it in. There is no other means by which you, the voter, can have any expectation that your actual vote matters in any election.
Show up. Fill it out, hand it in.
If your town or county government collects votes electronically on a screen, you need to figure out how the hell you’re going to get back to paper ballots when the only way to do it is with the screen.
You need Congress for that (perhaps), thank you, but you have to use a screen, so we need to elect them for you. Get them to ban those things and require paper even if it is machine-counted.
In my state, we have a debate over using machines to count anything election-related, but you can find that elsewhere on these pages.
Anyway, you can hack any election, even the paper-ballot kind (fake floods, kick out the observers, block the windows, suitcases full of ballots), but it’s a lot harder, and that’s the point of the Texas law and laws like it across the country. And it’s not just chain of custody from you to the thing that counts it.
The USPS court case would do nothing but require assigned tracking barcodes on the envelopes, which would identify actual mail-in ballots. No barcodes not issued by an election authority, last point tracking, no more post marking shenanigans, and if they get lost, damaged, or stolen, someone has a point of departure where chain of custody ended if not in the hands of the ballot clerk, poll worker, or moderator.
Regular readers will have seen a number of articles on what the ballot clerks, moderators, and Secretary of State’s Office do regarding chain of custody after the town assumes responsibility for your vote.
The kindest thing I could say is that it could be a lot better, and violations of the rules or the law need to have teeth that actually bite. Sure, it might dissuade citizens from putting themselves in front of that freight train, but that hasn’t stopped the cheaters, and they can’t be the only people out there willing to do that work.
Securing and handling ballots after you cast them remains a challenge, especially if there is a challenge to the posted results. It is a less visible problem to most voters and, frankly, not something that even occurs to them, but mishandled votes and recounts can produce results that were not the will of the voters, so they are no less critical.
Delinquent public education standards, also the voters’ responsibility, can be blamed for that. You don’t show up; ‘They’ will take your money and waste it on what’s important to them, which includes generations of future voters with little curiosity about a system meant to help them elect people to protect their rights, not take them away.
If you can secure the election chain of custody, as best you can, you’ve improved the odds the results will more closely reflect the will of the people. Getting them off their asses to care about any of this is a problem, but getting them up and out to vote is the biggest one of all. One that hinges on all the perceptions, real or imagined, about election integrity.
