Fresh on the heels of Monday’s report detailing alleged illegal vote harvesting in Minnesota, comes news of explosive affidavits filed about even worse vote harvesting in Texas.
Combined with new reports about significant illegal voter registration, also in Texas, and another huge foul-up in a postal voting system in New York, these stories all highlight some of the dangers to democracy posed by widespread use of voting by mail and other insecure practices.
They join other stories of huge voting screw-ups in recent months, ranging from the 223,000 undeliverable ballots mailed out in this year’s primary election in Las Vegas, to the judicial race in Atlanta that may need to be voided because of double-voting and other irregularities. Meanwhile, liberal judges across the country are risking tremendous confusion and fraud by unilaterally rewriting state laws in order to force the counting of ballots that arrive after Election Day.
For all of President Trump’s over-the-top trash talking about whether he’ll abide by election results, the truth is that it’s the political Left that actually is doing things nationwide that could create conditions for reasonable people to question the legitimacy of some of this fall’s contests. Sometimes paranoia can be well rooted in elements of truth.
Let’s take today’s three new stories as examples, saving the most apparently corrupt one for last. The first Texas story involved records going back three decades showing that, on average, more than 100 illegal immigrants per year were allowed to register to vote in Harris County. If they voted in close elections, they could improperly tip the scales to the wrong winner.
That’s small potatoes, though, compared to the voluminous foul-ups experienced in New York City’s attempts this year to expand use of vote-by-mail. In spring primary elections, more than 20% of all ballots had to be thrown out, and it took weeks to determine official results in some races. Some people still question whether those results were accurate. Just today comes news of continuing goofs: Large numbers of people who asked to vote by mail were sent ballots inside “official absentee envelopes” containing the names of other voters. Voters who don’t catch the mismatch could see their ballots invalidated, through no fault of their own.
As reported by the New York Times, “the printing errors appear to be widespread.” It is not known how many of the more than 500,000 mail-in-ballot applications (so far) contain the error.
Those are just the innocent mistakes that easily can plague systems that over-rely on mailed ballots. The attempts at outright fraud are even more worrisome. And fraud is exactly what is alleged by two Texas private investigators: one a former police officer and the other a former FBI agent. Their court affidavits detail what they say is a large, illegal vote-harvesting scheme run in part by Dallas Jones, Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s state political director. Jones is allegedly conducting the effort under the direction of a county commissioner and a Texas state senator.
The affidavit of former Houston Police Captain Mark Aguirre claims there are “video-taped interviews of witnesses attesting” to “widespread” fraudulent practices, including not just improperly taking advantage of nursing-home residents and forging the names of homeless people, but also voting in the name of people who are dead. The affidavit of former FBI agent Charles Marler is similar, alleging that one of the fraudsters boasted that he could harvest up to 700,000 illegal ballots.
Vote fraud is very real, and it becomes significantly easier with widespread mail-in voting. This year’s near-national embrace of that practice seriously endangers this fall’s electoral validity.
