Elections should not be determined by who cheats better.

by Rob Roper

A few weeks ago, I did a piece on the alleged voter fraud that took place in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in which a Democrat Party official was caught on video stuffing absentee ballots into drop boxes around the city. Further investigation discovered that she had been using official data from a low-income housing program that should have been private to target vulnerable voters, then filling out absentee ballots for them before returning them to unsupervised drop boxes. Update on that story: a judge threw out the results of Bridgeport mayoral primary election because of the fraud that took place and its magnitude. So, we can scratch that “alleged” qualifier used earlier.

Meanwhile, over in Lawrence, Massachusetts, there is video evidence of someone stealing absentee ballots out of people’s mailboxes, filling them out, and turning them in. According to the local NBC affiliate,

NBC10 Boston has obtained video footage from a man’s home that appears to show a woman removing ballots from his mailbox.

The man, who did not want to be identified, said he went to vote in person on Election Day last week and was told, according to the list, he already voted.

So, he checked his camera footage and then contacted the police….

As of Tuesday afternoon, there were two reports of potential voter fraud—or stolen ballots— in Lawrence.

“There may be more. It’s premature to say how many,” [Secretary of State William] Galvin said.

May be more? Yeah. I’m sure this person just went into this one stranger’s mailbox, stole just this one ballot, and cast just one counterfeit vote for the sheer thrill of it all. No systematic absentee ballot fraud operation happening here, no sirree.

A couple things to note about these cases. First, it took a highly motivated citizen to detect, report, and pursue this fraud — plus the luck of a well placed security camera. Election officials were oblivious, and therefore would have been perfectly happy and ready to count the fraudulent vote. In the other incident referred to in the story, it’s not even clear whose vote election officials will ultimately count – the fake one or the real voter’s. Because if somebody steals your vote, how do you prove it absent security video? Lastly, it will be extremely hard to identify the person on the video stealing the ballots. Not holding my breath that this person will ever be caught or prosecuted. Pleasantly surprise me!

Moving down the road to Springfield, Massachusetts, another Democratic mayoral candidate is facing vote fraud accusations, this time that an operative from his campaign was caught on video paying people ten bucks a pop to vote early for his candidate. According to MassLive,

Signed affidavits from the city clerk, four city election workers and a police officer document what they witnessed, including multiple voters asking city staff about where to get their $10.

“I heard people asking ‘Where is my payment’ and ‘I was promised ten dollars,’” reads an affidavit signed Tuesday by Daisy Lorenzana, who works in the elections department. “I had seven people ask me directly where their ten dollar payment was,” she writes, adding that a man said in Spanish “vote for Hurst and you’ll get ten dollars.”

Great…. But, this is an example of why you need to require filling out a ballot in person in the presence of election officials. These voters in question were voting at the clerk’s office. Were they stupid to ask election officials where to get their bribe money? Yes! Do they clearly have no clue about election law? You betcha they had no clue! I guarantee you none of them was weighing the possibility that doing this could get them a $10,000 fine and a year in prison so maybe not worth it. But the fact that voting in person created the opportunity for them to be stupid in front of election officials is how they got caught – which led to catching the guy running the scam. Yes, one good reason why we should require voting in person.

Beyond that, having pocketed their ten dollars, these voters were still able to fill out their ballots in secret for whomever they really wanted to. I mean seriously, are you going to trust the person who just sold you their vote for ten bucks to be honest with you about who they really voted for if they do so in secret? So even if they took the money (still a crime), voting in person is still a better system for free and fair elections.

But here in Vermont, where we send out absentee ballots to all voters regardless of request, these transactions don’t have to take place in front of election officials. They can take place in people’s homes or workplaces or under a bridge where even the most ignorant or mentally impaired coconspirator poses zero risk of blowing the cover off the scam. And, even better for the fraudster, who the ballot is filled out for can be verified, and returned by the fraudster for safe keeping. Yes, Vermont’s electoral system is a joke.

Which gets us to the next recent story, and switching parties here to keep things non-partisan, where an Iowa Republican’s wife was convicted on fifty-two counts of voter fraud perpetrated during her husband’s 2020 primary race for Iowa’s 4^th Congressional District and a subsequent campaign for local office. Kim Taylor’s scam involved taking advantage of recent Vietnamese immigrants who spoke little English. Taylor, a Vietnamese immigrant herself, according to the Justice Department’s press release:

“…completed and signed voter forms without voters’ permission and told others that they could sign on behalf of relatives who were not present.”

Taylor was caught when two of the people whose ballots she stole showed up in person to vote, were told they had already voted, but signature verification indicated that the fraudulently cast ballots were in fact fraudulent. Note: we don’t have signature verification in Vermont as a deterrent to vote fraud. In fact, in Vermont we don’t have ANY meaningful deterrent to voter fraud.

Remember that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Vermont lawmakers have over the years created a system in which evidence of voter fraud is nearly impossible to detect or collect because they have taken virtually every tool away from election officials for detecting fraud. We don’t require in person voting, we don’t have voter ID, we don’t have signature verification, we have removed pretty much every aspect of voting from registering to vote to casting a ballot out of the direct supervision of election officials, and we have given fraudsters 45 days of early voting in which to organize and fully exploit our hyper-lax election laws.

How can anyone expect honest citizens to trust the outcome of elections conducted under these conditions? We can’t. Until this is fixed, we have a system where the winner can be determined by who’s the best at cheating. Not a comforting way to pick the people who make our laws, is it?

Rob Roper is a freelance writer who has been involved with Vermont politics and policy for over 20 years. This article reprinted with permission from Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics, robertroper.substack.com