Commentary

Roper: Ballots are in the mail, and – Yikes!

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By Rob Roper, Behind The Lines

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 just say our current postal system is (searching for a polite term) in disarray. It’s understaffed. In many cases the employees that are 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 a number of 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 to NOT deliver the ballot to the address where our election officials sent it?) They are not given any specific oversight in this role — 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 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 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 Copeland-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.

  • Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.

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Event Notes: Rob Roper will be speaking on October 1, at the Wyckoff Sugarhouse, 18 Catamount Ln, Smugglers Notch, VT on “The Policies Making Vermont Unaffordable: A Look at what what Montpelier has been up to and has in store for VT taxpayers.” 5pm meet and greet with local candidates with the presentation beginning around 5:45 – 6pm.

Also Thurs, Oct 3, 6:30 pm, Ferrisburgh Town Hall.

And Tues, Oct 8, in Londonderry, details TBD.

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Categories: Commentary

18 replies »

  1. If there is no way to detect fraud, then there will be fraud. Mail in ballots is the definition of voter fraud.

  2. I have serious questions as to whether mail-in ballots are constitutional in the first place, but that doesn’t seem to be a can of worms the Supreme Court wants to open. By putting off all challenges that have reached them due to “standing”, the inevitable result is what we’re continuing to see – rampant abuse and cheating in the system. Which, conveniently, is exactly what the demonrat majority wants.

    My feeling is, sooner or later the Supreme Court is going to be forced to weigh in on this issue. Depending on how big the “cheat” is in November, my money is on sooner. January 2025 at the latest.

    And do you really want an organization (USPS) which is 90+% demonrat to be responsible for accurately delivering all mail-in ballots? I sure as heck don’t.

    I saw something the other day where some computer guy showed how changing just one value in a Dominion voting machine could flip a batch of votes to the opposite of what the ballot said. And this worked across all Dominion machines. The “password” or “access code” (sorry, I’m not a programmer) was the same for every machine, wherever it was installed. Given that the machines were proven to be hooked up to the internet when they weren’t supposed to be, one could flip any election they were told to flip with just a couple of keystrokes. Remotely. Seriously, we need to get to voter ID, paper ballots, hand counts with double verification, and a National Voting Day holiday. Pronto.

    Am I just a conspiwacy theowist? Maybe, but I’ll just relate the following. My wife and I both received mail-in ballots several weeks back. This past week, we each received another mail-in ballot. All were addressed to us, not to some past resident at our address and not to a couple of dead people. I’m tempted to video myself mailing one of those ballots in and then going to my local polling place to try to vote again.

    I have a strong suspicion that I could vote twice with no problem, especially if I sent in the mail-in ballot in the week before November 5. And if I were called on it? “Well, you know, I’m a ‘senior’ now, and well, I forget things more than I used to. Now that you mention it, I do remember mailing in that ballot. I apologize.”

    • Don’t try to vote again! Clerks can catch someone trying to vote twice under your own name. Once the first ballot is turned in your name is crossed off the list as having voted. If you show up again and try to vote in person they will not let you. However, if you say you didn’t cast that absentee ballot, I believe they will let you sign an affidavit and vote again. If someone did steal your ballot and vote on your behalf and you show up to vote, because we allow early counting of ballots in VT, the stolen vote cannot be teased out of the final count. It’s such a mess….

    • Re: And if I were called on it? “Well, you know, I’m a ‘senior’ now, and well, I forget things more than I used to. Now that you mention it, I do remember mailing in that ballot. I apologize.”

      Hey, as I’m sure you’re pointing out, that defense worked for Joe Biden in his documents case. “…a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,”.

      On the other hand, here in Vermont especially, if you, as a conservative, try that defense, you might well be fined a couple of hundred million dollars or even get yourself assassinated.

      Our everyday cartoon can’t become any more absurd.

    • Google was a huge player in flipping votes in the machines, some 3 million just over the Net in the last prez election against Trump. This is not reported on, but has been highly investigated. Check out Dr. Robert Epstein’ interview with Joe Rogan.

      Joe Rogan Experience #2201 – Robert Epstein
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azu8XnZdxeA (2:38:55) Start at 2:25 or listen / watch it all.

      Epstein’s web site is TameBigTach dot com

    • I guess my attempt at sarcasm was so subtle that some of you (except Mr Eshelman) took the end of my post seriously. Aside from actually receiving two mail-in ballots, the rest was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

      I’m well aware that as a conservative I have a target on my back, as do all of us who lean this way. Aside from my words, I’m very, very careful – but ‘thanks’ to those who expressed concern.

  3. The excuse for the 2020 mail-in nationwide ballot fiasco was the Plandemic. The Plandemic has ended. We need to go back to one vote, one legal citizen, cast in person. Let’s include WITH ID.

    • Unfortunately, we won’t get any changes under the current legislative and state elected office holders. Until the majority of voters wake up if ever, the mail in ballot scam will not change.

  4. It takes at least ten years for names of people who move out of state to be taken off the voter registry. I still get ballots for housemates who moved out that long ago.

    Now imagine Burlington’s transient college population, and the Orange Hitler hysteria. I would guess that the mail-in fraud is not at all insignificant.

    • Anyone who believes that a voter no longer lives at a particular address, should report this to the Town Clerk and BCA who will send the voter a “challenge” letter. By law, that voter will then be shown on the voter check-list with a “C” next to their name. If that voter attempts to vote while they are on the “challenge” list, they will have to answer questions about their residency; otherwise they are not allowed to vote. There is also another process in election law known as “purging” the voter. Title 17 (election law) was updated in 2021. BTW, a town’s voter checklist is a public record if you want to view it.

    • @SWALT In this case, it doesn’t fix anything. I rip up those ballots. In the case of Burlington’s student population, it doesn’t fix anything. What cheater is going to report this? And for what it is worth, my town clerk said she couldn’t do anything until “two election cycles,” had passed, which they did, and I still got ballots. I did finally get one request for residence confirmation on one former resident. Over ten years later. That’s a lot of extra ballots kicking around.

  5. Wow, so many assumptions here. Assumed postal workers and landlords risking prison by taking ballots out of the mail. How about this assumption: Of all of these imaginary would-be felons , let’s assume that 50% of them are Republicans, and 50% of them are Democrats. The number of imagined fraudulent ballots would be equal on both sides, right?

    • It’s been shown through multiple studies that the left can’t properly understand the perspective of the right, while the reverse is not the case… and this post is an excellent example.

    • They barely put felons in prison, your words are empty. With the crime load in VT as it is right now do you think the state or local police are going to hunt down election or voter fraud? It doesn’t matter which side is cheating, that’s the point, cheating is cheating, and policy changes need to be made. ID needs to be presented and some provisions for people who can’t get the polls to vote. Hand counting only and why are dem/progs so against these changes? You can’t do anything else in America without an ID!

    • They here did old people into homes in NY to harvest their ballots.
      They allowed mail in voters to “correct” their mail in ballots but not their in person ones.
      They kicked Republican observers out of a counting center in Georgia and then resumed the count.
      They made a system that was easily rigged and impossible to audit because there was no chain of custody.

      They did all of that and we are expected to believe that they didn’t cheat.

    • Biran, if you watch the video you’ll see that the threats of prison/fines/punishment are non-existent because there is no way to detect that the ballots were fraudulently cast. And that’s the problem in our system. There may be lots of fraud, there may be little fraud. We have no idea and no way to find out. But, psychological experiments have been done that show if cheating is allowed and shown that it won’t be punished, incidents of cheating goes way up.

      And just food for thought, I guess it’s because people don’t want to risk getting pinched for committing a property crime that they never ever steal or destroy political lawn signs.