by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, July 2020
"Voting by mail should be implemented nationwide. Pass it on" -- Rep. James Clyburn (D, SC), House Democrat Whip and Biden advisor, chain-tweet reposted by tens of thousands of Democrat minions on Twitter, 6/11/20
"We're now calling it 'vote at home', because that's really what it's all about ... [E]very voter would receive an absentee ballot ... [T]his becomes a health issue ... [S]tanding in those lines, for that amount of time, going to places that are enclosed, is dangerous to your health. And vote-by-mail is more democratic .. it removes obstacles and barriers to voting" -- Nancy Pelosi, on MSNBC, 5/20/20
Welcome to the big Democrat push for a national vote-by-mail system -- to "protect" voter from the coronovirus and imaginary Republican "vote suppression". Democrats are now in unison, demanding that we all vote by mail.
But liberals were against mail-in voting before they were for it. On October 6, 2012, just weeks before the election to decide whether Barack Obama would get a second term, The New York Times ran a devastating expose on the dangers of the practice. Originally titled "As More Vote by Mail, Faulty Ballots Could Impact Elections", reporter Adam Liptak cautioned, "[V]otes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised, and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show."
This wasn't controversial when it was published. The Times continued: "Election administrators have a shorthand name for a central weakness of voting by mail. They call it granny farming... Voters in nursing homes can be subjected to ... intimidation or fraud... And their ballots can be intercepted both coming and going... Absentee ballots also make it much easier to buy and sell votes. In recent years, courts have invalidated mayoral elections in Illinois and Indiana because of fraudulent absentee ballots."
The bottom line, according to The New York Times: "Voting by mail ... problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner."
Well that was then, and this is now. In 2012, the media wanted to ensure Obama's reelection. In 2020, vote fraud is the last remaining traditional Democrat tool to prevent Trump's reelection. So all hell broke loose when President Trump tweeted on May 26: "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail Boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed ... This will be a Rigged Election. No way!"
Twitter swooped in with a big blue exclamation point: "Get the facts about mail-in ballots." Yes, in a Twitter first, something called "Twitter Safety" was "fact checking" the President, consisting of a compilation of hack drive-by-media propaganda about "perfectly safe" mail-in voting. (Sort of like "mostly peaceful" riots.) Well, let's fact check the left's "fact check", shall we? There's a reason they're lying, because the truth is damning -- for the Democrats and their mail-in scheme:
MEDIA COVERUP
"Historically, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud through mail-in voting. But some social media users have pushed grandiose theories casting doubt on the method." -- AP, 6/8/20
"Miniscule Number of Potentially Fraudulent Ballots in States with Universal Mail Voting Undercuts Trump Claims about Election Risks." -- The Washington Post, 6/8/20
"[B]allot fraud is extremely rare." -- The Washington Post, 5/28/20
"There is no evidence to back up his [Trump's] claims about widespread ballot theft or signature forgery across California. Furthermore, there's no evidence ballots counted on or after election day in California's 2018 elections were illegally obtained or 'harvested'." -- CNN "fact-checking", 5/27/20
"Mail ballot fraud is exceedingly rare in part because states have systems and processes in place to prevent forgery, theft, and voter fraud." -- CNN, 5/27/20. CNN's source for this claim is the Brennan Center for Justice, whose largest donor is George Soros' Open Society, according to Influence Watch.
"[W]ithout evidence, Trump has claimed that mail-in voting is particularly susceptible to fraud, casting it as a lawless, unregulated exercise where ballots are stolen from mailboxes, voter signatures are routinely forged, and even the ballots themselves are illegally printed." -- CNN, 5/27/20
"The reality is mail-in ballots, absentee ballots, are well utilized all across the spectrum, all across this country, and have been done so thoughtfully and safely for a generation." -- Gov. Gavin Newsom (D, CA), on NBC's "Morning Joe", 5/27/20
"Voting by mail is secure." -- Alex Padilla, California Secretary of State on NBC News, 5/27/20
"We conclude that vote-by-mail does not increase voter fraud and that necessary safeguards are well documented in states that routinely process millions of mail ballots without any voter fraud." -- "Debunking the Myth of Voter Fraud in Mail In Ballots," 4/14/20. The "study" was conducted by three leftist organizations: UCLA Voting Rights Project, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Center for Social Policy.
REAL STORY
Botched Ballots.
"About 100,000 mail-in ballots were returned as 'undeliverable' in Rhode Island's [6/2/20] primary election, according to state records." -- Breitbart, 6/10/20
"[The Georgia] Secretary of State noted that he has launched an investigation into difficulties in Fulton County, home of Atlanta, where many voters requested ballots by mail with plenty of time to spare -- some as far back as May -- and still haven't received them." -- The Hour, 6/9/20
"During early voting for a municipal election [May 2020] in Paterson, NJ, mail-in ballots were allegedly stacked outside of apartment buildings rather than put in individual mailboxes, and a post office in neighboring Haledon found 300 Paterson ballots bundled in a mailbox there. When the county wrapped up checking the mail-in ballots to make sure they complied with the rules, 3,190 ballots, or 19 percent of the mail-in vote, were disqualified." -- Real Clear Investigations, 6/7/20
"Yes, we do have a problem with the Baltimore City elections. Namely, voter disenfranchisement through gross administrative incompetence and citywide irregularities." -- Peter Franchot, Maryland Comptroller, after hundreds of missing mail-in ballots and printing errors resulted in chaos, Twitter, 6/3/20
"...Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf has issued an edict granting an extra week for the delivery of mail-in ballots for six Democrat counties... For those who have followed Democrat voter fraud over the years, extending poll closing times for Democrat areas has been a common tactic to give leftist candidates an edge by stretching out the counting process and giving fraudsters extra time to 'find' Democrat votes." -- The Franklin County [PA] Journal blog, 6/2/20
"No, I didn't fill out this ballot. Somebody filled it out for me against my wishes." -- unnamed elderly man to author Eric Eggers as recounted in his book, Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election, quoted at Just the News, 5/29/20
"A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that in the 2008 Presidential election, 7.6 million of 35.5 million mail-in ballots requested were not counted because they never reached voters or were rejected for irregularities. That is a failure rate of more than 21 percent... [I]magine the impact that would have had in a close election in which mail-in voting is tried on a massive scale." -- Marc Thiessen, The Washington Post, 5/28/20
"[Y]ou are seeing videos of thousands of [mail-in] ballots that are piled up in apartments and trash cans and in hallways [in Las Vegas]." -- Adam Laxalt, former Nevada Attorney General, Fox News, 5/26/20
"From Friday to Monday, I could have voted 20 times." -- unnamed resident, Las Vegas apartment complex, quoted at Fox News, 5/22/20. Dozens of mail-in ballots delivered to neighborhood residents who had died or moved away were pinned to community bulletin boards.
"The data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Election Administration and Voter Surveys for the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 election cycles finds that nearly 30 million mail-in ballots sent to registered voters went missing." -- Breitbart, 4/20/20
"Mail-In Ballots Make Voter Fraud Easy. I Know Because I Did It." -- Margaret Menge, explaining how she was able to obtain a mail-in ballot for a fictitious person in Palm Beach County, quoted in The [Fort Lauderdale] Sun-Sentinel, 4/16/20
"Three tubs of absentee ballots that never reached voters were discovered in a postal center outside Milwaukee. At least 9,000 absentee ballots requested by voters were never sent, and others recorded as sent were never received. Even when voters did return their completed ballots in the mail, thousands were postmarked too late to count -- or not at all." -- The New York Times, 4/9/20
"Harvesting".
"[A]round two-thirds of election fraud offenses prosecuted by my office have involved some form of mail-ballot fraud. These prosecutions include instances of forgery and falsification of ballots. One man pleaded guilty after forging 1,200 mail-in ballot applications, resulting in 700 suspected fraudulent votes in a 2017 Dallas election." -- Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General, Fox News, 5/27/20
"Once mail ballots go out, harvesters show up at a voter's door and engage the voter to provide 'voting assistance'. ... [A] common practice involves giving the voter the impression that the harvester is an election official... [S]uccessful vote harvesters leave with a voter's signature and a ballot that is either blank, voted in the way the harvester wants, or that can be modified (or disposed of) later." -- Ken Paxton, Fox News, 5/27/20. A video that surfaced during the 2018 primary in Houston shows a harvester collecting a signature and a ballot application in 20 seconds.
"'Ballot harvesting' has made news in California, where activists have canvassed neighborhoods collecting votes. The registrar in Orange County reported in 2018 that his office had 'people dropping off maybe 100 or 200 ballots.' [In] Wisconsin, ... the Elections Commission told voters in March that ballots may be returned by 'a family member or another person.' Technically, that covers anybody at the door..." -- The Wall Street Journal, 5/22/20
"Nevada is a case study of the lengths Democrats will go ... First [DNC lawyer] Marc Elias ... sued the state on behalf of Democrat groups, demanding election officials break laws against ballot harvesting, ignore signature verification requirements, and send ballots to inactive voters the state believes moved away." -- Ronna McDaniel, RNC chair, Fox News, 5/22/20
"[U]nfortunately California has removed any means ... [to] supervise this process ... [of] ballot harvesting ... [In 2018,] paid political operatives, known as 'ballot brokers', ... encourage[d], and even assist[ed] ... unsuspecting voters in requesting a mail-in ballot; weeks later when the ballot arrives in the mail the same ballot brokers are there to assist the voter in filling out and delivering their ballot ... [I]t has been reported that these ballot brokers intercept and destroy mail-in ballots of voters who traditionally vote against the brokers' preferred party." -- Report on Political Weaponization of Ballot Harvesting in California," Congressional Committee on House Administration, 5/14/20
"The Los Angeles County Registrar's Office [placed] a large bin outside of its office building to serve as a deposit location for vote-by-mail ballots, with no election officials or registrar staff present to supervise ... [T]here is no way to track who drops off ballots, whether they are affiliated with a campaign organization, or what their relationship is to the voters whose ballots they have been entrusted with ... [D]ropping off huge quantities of ballots raises the specter for potential fraud..." -- "Report on Political Weaponization of Ballot Harvesting in California," Congressional Committee on House Administration, 5/14/20
"Eight states, as well as the District of Columbia, have total voter registration tallies exceeding 100 percent, and in total, 38 states have counties where voter registration rates exceed 100 percent ... America's voter rolls are a mess -- and everyone knows it." -- Real Clear Investigations, 7/11/19
"[I]t got so organized in Texas, something had to be done ... Some of these [ballot harvester] workers can make $4,000 or $5,000 in an election." -- Buck Wood, former Texas Elections Division director, Real Clear Investigations, 2/27/19
"True Confessions".
"[T]here is a huge difference between sending ballots to a small number of citizens who request them and requiring that they be mailed to every registered voter, as Democrats are demanding. Under the Democrats' plan, ballots would inevitably be sent to wrong addresses or inactive voters, putting millions of blank ballots into circulation -- an invitation for fraud." -- The Washington Post, 5/28/20
"Vote by mail, that we know, is the greatest source of voter fraud in this state." -- unnamed Democratic Texas legislator, quoted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Fox News, 5/27/20
"Invalidate the election. Let's do it [over] again. These kinds of acts make people not want to vote anymore. They feel disenfranchised, disconnected that their votes don't count, and that is not fair to people." -- Rev. Kenneth Clayton, Paterson, NJ NAACP leader, after 20 percent of all ballots in the 2020 city council election were disqualified, some due to voter fraud, NBC New York, 5/27/20. Gov. Phil Murphy (D, NJ) had ordered a vote-by-mail election.
"Vote by mail is a disaster. People who think it works haven't studied the failures. The facts show mail voting doesn't work." -- J. Christian Adams, Public Interest Legal Foundation [PILF] President, Breitbart, 4/20/20
"It [mail-in voting] is a harder system to administer, and obviously it's a harder system to police writ large. People showing up, people actually showing ID, is still the easiest system to assure total integrity." -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D, NY), quoted in The New York Times, 4/9/20. Obviously Cuomo will have to disavow his inadvertent swerve into the truth.
"The time has come to consider an alternative to mail-in voting. We need to replace it with something better. Something that can't be hijacked." -- Omar Escobar, Jr., Starr County, TX District Attorney, Real Clear Investigations, 2/17/19. Escobar, a Democrat, admits he sees an enormous amount of voter fraud in Texas; he considers mail-in ballots and how they are handled a "threat to democracy."
"[A]bsentee balloting ... has been one of the major sources of fraud." -- Jimmy Carter and James Baker, Report on the Commission on Election Reform, 9/05
DEMOCRAT OFFENSIVE
"Democrats are challenging an Arizona ballot rule that would disqualify ballots that do not include signatures instead of giving voters time to correct them. The DNC, the Arizona Democratic Party, and the DSCC filed a lawsuit Wednesday [6/10/20] against the Arizona Secretary of State and other county officials disputing the rule... It asks the state's Secretary of State to give voters five business days after the federal elections to fix ballots without signatures." -- Democrats Challenge Arizona Mail-In Ballot Rule," in The Hill, 6/11/20
"Democrats are mounting a new effort to push back against a well-funded Republican campaign that seeks to undermine public confidence in mail-in voting, which President Donald Trump has said, without offering proof, will lead to election fraud. Fair Fight, an organization led by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has joined forces with Priorities USA, the largest Democratic outside group, and American Bridge, the party's opposition research clearinghouse, to form a new effort called Voter Suppression Watch." -- AP, 6/8/20
"Democrats are suing to allow third-party collection in a number of states, including battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina." -- NPR, 6/4/20
"In North carolina ... Democratic legal groups filed a lawsuit arguing that the state should provide prepaid postage for all ballots, eliminate the requirements for two witnesses to sign a mail-in ballot, extend the deadline for when a mail ballot must be received, and allow for voters to fix any signature discrepancies before the state can reject a ballot ... in Florida, Democratic organizations filed a lawsuit seeking to suspend ballot-return deadlines and laws limiting who is allowed to collect vote-by-mail ballots and deliver them to local election offices. Similar lawsuits have been filed in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which will be critical in deciding the race between President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden." -- NBC News, 5/30/20
"We need to make sure every eligible voter has access to vote-by-mail, that way every individual doesn't have to choose between ... their vote and their decision to keep themselves and their family safe." -- Myrna Perez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the so-called "nonpartisan" Soros-funded Brennan Center for Justice, NBC News, 5/30/20
"On May 8, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D, CA) signed an order ensuring that every registered voter in the state will receive a mail-in ballot in the fall. And no doubt unregistered ones as well.
I'm telling you, if leftists can riot, if they can occupy their stupid Seattle "autonomous zone" utopia, if we can go to grocery stores, then Americans can damn well go vote in person. The universal mail-in voting that the Democrats are pushing for is a crock and a cheat.