Their number is legion, ranging from the Afghanistan surrender to the border invasion to the economy. But it’s a different subject that caused my coffee to get cold this morning. In particular it was this headline from Reuters: “California becomes 8th U.S. state to make universal mail-in ballots permanent.”
Here’s the opening paragraph:
California on Monday became the eighth, and by far the largest, U.S. state to make universal distribution of vote-by-mail ballots permanent, a practice that became more widespread during the COVID-19-plagued 2020 election cycle.
The eyebrow-raising aspect of this report is not that the Golden State just concretized its blueness. California, with its 55 electoral votes, has been a reliable Democratic stronghold for nearly three decades. Rather it’s that a growing number of states now subscribe to the constitutional aberration that is mail-in voting, which as Reuters notes was supposed to be a temporary fix “during the COVID-19-plagued 2020 election cycle.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
The countless opportunities for cheating afforded by this careless strategy turned the 2020 election into a mockery. Mail-in ballots had no specific security features — like a stamp or a watermark to ensure legitimacy. On top of that, many jurisdictions accepted ballots with no signature. Once the dust settled, one of the least stimulating candidates ever to run for high office allegedly ended up with the highest popular vote total of any presidential candidate in history.
Incidents of missing ballots were widespread, and not just after the 2020 election. As Mark Hemingway noted during the run-up to the 2020 election, 28 million mail-in ballots had gone missing in the previous four national elections.
Oblivious to — or perhaps mindful of — those statistics, Democrats were bullish in their support of mail-in voting. That explains the findings of a survey by the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, which revealed that Biden voters were twice as likely as Trump voters to vote by mail.
One might reasonably ask Democrats why they are so eager to continue the practice of distributing mail-in ballots when the reason for doing so in 2020 is likely to evaporate long before the 2022 election. In other words, the COVID pandemic is likely to be a memory by the time of the next national election, so why shouldn’t voters be required to return to the polls to cast their votes, as they have since the time of the founders?
Democrats will point to the “new voting requirements and limits passed this year by Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas and the battleground states of Georgia, Florida and Arizona.” They will disingenuously argue that these limits, whether intended to do so or not, will disenfranchise minority voters, ignoring the realities of why these laws were passed in the first place.
