Just back in June we got a preview of what mass mail-in voting would look like nationally when 1-in-5 ballots in the Paterson New Jersey election were disqualified following accusations of widespread fraud, voter intimidation, and ballot theft. That happened not along after it was reported that 500-700 Republican voters in one New Jersey township received ballots listing only Democrat candidates in the mail.
While an incredible 20% of ballots were disqualified in Paterson, President Donald Trump now has a new “Exhibit A” in Brooklyn to argue against mail-in voting, where 25% of ballots had to be disqualified.
According to the New York Post:
A staggering 25 percent of mail-in ballots cast in Brooklyn for June’s primary elections were declared invalid, it was revealed on Tuesday, as Mayor Bill de Blasio called on the Board of Elections to shape up by November.
More than 120,000 absentee ballots were filed in Kings County for the June 23 primary but about 30,000 were initially disqualified — and it wasn’t the fault of the voters, according to Rodneyse Bichotte, head of the Brooklyn Democratic Party.
Bichotte — also a state assemblywoman whose district includes Flatbush, Ditmas Park and Midwood — said the disqualifying issues included a lack of postmark or late arrival.
The BOE was still untangling the mess six weeks after the primaries and was unable to provide hard citywide figures on Tuesday.
Citywide, over 80,000 ballots have been disqualified, or 21% of the total cast.
Even without any bad actors there are still massive logistical problems with mail-in voting that the government simply isn’t competent enough to address. Over 1.1 million stimulus checks were recently sent to dead people – how do we know the same wouldn’t happen with ballots? While the 1.1 million sent to the wrong people accounted for only 0.5% of stimulus checks sent (by dollar value), a 0.5% margin is more than enough to make a difference in an election (particularly in swing states). And that’s just the potential error rate for people receiving the wrong ballot. The USPS’ lost mail rate has to be added onto that, which unfortunately isn’t known.
Swing states like Michigan were decided by a minuscule 0.3% margin (with Trump garnering 13,080 more votes) in 2016, while New Hampshire was decided by a mere 2,701 votes. How does anyone think the results in those states would be received in a situation where tens of thousands of ballots had to be disqualified?
