There is an immense partisan divide when it comes to voting in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election. We The People desire an honest and reliable election but there are various consenting opinions on mail-in voting vs in-person voting that create a challenging scenario for the citizens of the United States to discern what to believe. People are unsure if it is safe to go to the polling stations during the coronavirus pandemic. There is confusion over the reliability of mail-in voting, and why President Trump voices concern over the results of the election being an accurate representation of We The People.
The questions that need to be answered are: Is it safe to vote in-person? Does mail-in voting have a record of being a reliable way to vote? Do ballots get delivered to the correct destination for citizens that are alive and registered to vote at that address? Can you request not to be sent a mail-in ballot? What is the difference between mail-in voting and absentee voting? What will happen to the ballots of people who don’t vote, are sent to the wrong address, or sent to people that are deceased?
Is it safe to vote in-person?
Many people are under the misconception that the experts don’t think it is safe to vote in person because the leaders of the Democratic party constantly insist there is an imminent danger to people voting in the polls. Fortunately for We The People, the experts have spoken on the matter at hand in a nonpartisan fashion.
Dr Anthony Fauci
“I think if carefully done, according to the guidelines, there’s no reason that I can see why that not be the case. For example, you know, when you look at going to a grocery store now in many regions and counties and cities that are doing it correctly, they have X’s every six or more feet. And it says, ‘Don’t leave this spot until the person in front of you left their spot.’ And you can do that, if you go and wear a mask, if you observe the physical distancing, and don’t have a crowded situation, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do that,” Dr. Fauci said.
Dr. anthony fauci
Dr. Fauci, the director of NIAID of the NIH, is on the record just last month1 saying voting in person is as safe as going to the grocery store. He does address his expectation of social distancing and mask-wearing to enhance the safety measures for being at the polls, but he thinks it’s safe nevertheless. The left-wing media outlets acknowledge him saying it is safe, but act as though getting voters to practice social distancing and mask-wearing are impossible feats2 to accomplish, and that his quote above is taken out of context. This is one of the times when I consider even taken out of context, the meaning is the same. If you planned on going to the grocery that day but went to vote instead, the risks should have insignificant distinctions between the two.
Dr Deborah Birx
“If you go into Starbucks in the middle of Texas and Alabama and Mississippi that have very high case rates, then I can’t say that it would be different waiting in line in the polls.”
Deborah Birx
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator, has also said that it would be safe to vote in person4. She also stresses the social distancing and mask-wearing and laughs when comparing it to people like herself who regularly go to Starbucks5. Although I do not agree that we need to wear masks because the 0.12 micron-sized SARS-CoV-2 is so small that it can have extremely high levels of viral penetration wearing cloth or surgical masks3, I think that voting on the future of our nation in such a monumental election is worth wearing a mask for.
In the same interview, Dr. Birx told CBN News, “I’ve met with many people inside. What I always do is wear a mask… that’s what we need to do in the churches. Churches are filled with people who are compassionate and passionate for each other. Let’s show that compassion for each other”. When asked specifically about churches in California being required to only meet outdoors, Birx said, “Well, if the same officials are having meetings because they have to discuss what to do with the virus, if people are meeting and socially distancing in federal or state buildings, then you can bring that same safety to any American but you need to really be rigid about wearing a mask and socially distancing.”
Between the two top experts whom we’ve based all of our guidelines on throughout the pandemic, it is unanimous that voting in-person can easily be done safely and is nothing to be concerned about. Fear should be greatly reduced by the newly released CDC estimate scenarios, it is clearly stated in Scenario 56 (the estimate of the current situation) that the population under 70-years old averages an infection fatality rate of 0.1%. When compared to the 0.6% of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic7, surprisingly, COVID-19 is statistically much less deadly.
What is mail-in voting’s record of reliability?
The way the far-Left is portraying mail-in voting during the current pandemic is misleading at best, and a double standard when compared to their prior position on the matter. There is a massive amount of misinformation on the subject of mail-in voting’s reliability, which along with the exaggeration of the deadliness of the coronavirus pandemic, is leading people to believe that it is the only viable option.
The mainstream media was whistling a completely different tune in regards to mail-in ballots across the board not to long ago. The New York Times currently has a plethora of articles with headlines such as, “Trump is Pushing a False Argument in Vote-by-Mail Fraud8,” yet in 2012 they wrote an article titled, “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises9.” They go into detail about the dangers of mail-in voting, this being for ballots actually requested, causing ballots to be manually rejected by local elections boards. Some reasons include discrepancies about signatures having matching/irregular letters and placement of signature.
In an interview with an elections supervisor in Florida, The New York Times reported, “votes 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. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting. The more people you force to vote by mail, the more invalid ballots you will generate.”
They continue to say, “Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond. If the contests next month are close enough to be within what election lawyers call the margin of litigation, the grounds on which they will be fought will not be hanging chads but ballots cast away from the voting booth.”
In an article from Courthouse News, they address the ACLU’s outrage at the tens of thousands of ballots discarded in San Francisco, CA due to issues regarding signatures in 201711 saying, “Tens of thousands of California absentee ballots are tossed in the trash in every election on the basis of handwriting comparisons made by officials who are not trained in the art, a Sonoma County man and the ACLU claim in state court.”
It seems highly unlikely that the current mail-in ballots will suddenly avoid these longstanding issues being that there is nothing that changed in regards to the way the ballots are counted. Misplaced signatures will still be unacceptable, along with signatures that don’t exactly match the signatures on file for that voter. If they get laxer about those rules then you have more opportunity for voter fraud for ballots not meant for the person they were sent to. Either way you look at it, it is nowhere near as reliable as voting in-person.
There is also the problematic risk of ballots being trashed after they get sent out by the voter. Just in the News reported a few days ago10, “Federal investigators have discovered discarded military mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, all of which were made out in favor of President Trump, a U.S. attorney said Thursday. David Freed, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, said in a press release that “a small number of military ballots” were discovered discarded in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.”
A man and his father in Petaluma, CA recently discovered thousands of unopened12, yet signed, ballots from the 2018 election at a dumpster at a garbage dump. The man’s father asked the woman who worked there about the dumpster and she informed him that it was from the county. He took photos of the workers that were trying to cover up the ballots with trash as well as the photograph shown.
Do people receive mail-in ballots not meant for them?
In short, YES. People receive ballots for people who are deceased or no longer a resident at that address quite often.
In August, The Honolulu Civil Beat reported13, “As Honolulu implements its first-ever vote by mail election, some ballots are being sent to people who are no longer living at their registered address – or are no longer living at all. Hauula resident Thomas Adolpho said he got five ballots for renters who haven’t lived on his property in over a decade. Enele Ongoongotau Jr. said he received a ballot at his Kahuku home for his niece who moved to the mainland last year. Kaneohe resident Jennifer Nakamura has a ballot for her uncle who is incarcerated. And one woman, who didn’t want to be named, said she received a ballot for her father who died five years ago in Utah.”
In a 2012 study NPR reported on done by the Pew Center on the States, they found that 1.8 million deceased people were still registered to vote14, so it makes sense that with the universal mail-in voting, people would end up receiving ballots for dead people.
NPR goes on to say, “Election officials say one problem is that Americans move around a lot. And when they do, they seldom alert the local election office that they’ve left. Ben Skupien […] has moved repeatedly over the years and says he’s probably registered to vote in about a half-dozen states. “The assumption, I would think, is that they would do the courtesy of letting the other states know that if you’re registered with a new state, [the old registration] would no longer apply,” said Skupien. In fact, states seldom share such information. The Pew study15 found that almost 3 million people are registered to vote in more than one state.”
Will they automatically send you a mail-in ballot?
Yes, as you can see from the above infographic taken from the Wall Street Journal, nine states and the District of Columbia are sending out mail-in ballots automatically, and you cannot request to not have one sent. Considering the issues stated so far in this article, that seems like it could indeed be quite problematic. Numerous states have sent out applications for mail-in ballots, and there have already been many applications sent out to deceased individuals, showing there is still a flawed voter registration system. Michigan, for example, already sent out mail-in ballots automatically back in May17, many of them going to people who were no longer at the residence or no longer alive.
According to Associated Press18, back in July, “Ron Tims said he checked his mail Wednesday and found a voter registration application addressed to Cody Tims — his cat, who died 12 years ago.” Yes, you read that correctly. The man hilariously said his cat would have voted DemoCAT.
If you go to this site on President Trump’s campaign page21, you can enter your contact details and it will give you the state site for you to check on your status, and whatever else your state provides.
You may be able to check your status of your voting status. In California you visit this site to check your status22 and there is tracking available for your mail in ballot. You can also check the status of prior elections, and apparently, from the pictures above, you can see that my ballot disappeared for the primaries. It was not accepted or rejected. Just gone. I found that to be disconcerting.
How do mail-in voting and absentee voting differ?
There is another common misconception about mail-in voting. People have been saying that it is no different than when they mailed in their vote before. Though many of the problems already listed would impact the outcome of ballots cast considerably, there are even more problems that arise out of mass mail-in voting.
Absentee voting is the way people traditionally do mail-in voting, aside from a handful of states that already did mail-in voting like Utah and Colorado. The difference between absentee and mail-in voting is that the absentee ballots are requested by the voters while the mass mail-in ballots are sent to everyone who is registered to vote anywhere in the state. This includes many people who are deceased or registered at more than one address because the way their system works doesn’t allow the voting registrar to have access to things like death certificates or moving records of any sort, not that it would be a consistently reliable system if they did and it seems like a breach in privacy.
In fact, I only discovered through writing this article that you have to “unregister” your deceased relatives to get them taken off of the voter registration list19. There are many people who die without any loved ones to take them off of the list, and people like myself who would have had no clue that I needed to get them unregistered!
What happens to excess and unwanted ballots?
This is the ultimate question, yet it is one that has no true answer. Theoretically, in a perfect world, people would properly dispose of the ballots or notify the local government’s election officials. However, we, unfortunately, do not live in a perfect world, and there are some despicable ways excess ballots could be used against one’s opposing party in an election.
One way that came to mind was people who don’t vote, signing, and gifting their ballot to a friend or family to have an extra vote. It would require next to no effort at all, and ignorantly many people would be under the impression that they were being selfless; in reality, it is a selfish way for people to feel good about themselves in a way that cumulatively would prompt an unfair vote to be cast.
Receiving a ballot for a deceased person or a person no longer at the residence could be close to equally as problematic. Though there is a history of an issue with signatures not being verified because they aren’t a close enough match to the signatures on file with voter registration, it could go in the opposite direction because of the massive number of ballots. If the election officials become overwhelmed by verifying millions of signatures, there’s a possibility that fraudulent excess ballots may be skimmed over because of the pressure of getting the results to We The People as expediently as possible.
People who normally don’t vote may blindly vote in this election just because they got a ballot. If you don’t think that happens, just look to this year’s primaries for Sheriff in Cheshire County, NH where a self-described “transexual satanist anarchist,” Aria DiMezzo, won the vote for the GOP nominee20. Fortunately for them, they are running against Democrat incumbent, Eli Rivera, who has held the position for seven years.
This individual, however, ran a completely honest campaign of, I kid you not, “Fuck the police” with an anarchy symbol. Can’t really get much clearer about your politics and opinion on law enforcement than that, yet DiMezzo received over 4,000 votes from New Hampshire’s Republican voters who blindly voted based on party affiliation with no regard to the candidate’s character or qualifications. I encourage you to read this article written by DiMezzo20 which pretty much gives the middle finger to the people angry about who they decided to blindly vote for.
So you’re mad. I get it. I promise you: I get it. You feel betrayed. You may even be wondering how the party that you so believed in could do something like this. But, odds are, you’re blaming me. Most people are probably angry at me, and blaming me for all this. That’s silly. I was always upfront about who I am. The good man in Rindge who looked into me found out everything he needed to know with a simple Google search. There it was, plain as day:
Anarchist. Shemale. Tranny. Libertarian. “Fuck the police.” Free Talk Live. Bitcoin. Reformed Satanic Church. Black Lives Matter.
Aria DiMezzo
I found their contact page to be especially amusing. Literally a google search would have saved the Republicans their votes.
The Verdict
Ultimately, none of these issues with mail-in voting give an unfair advantage necessarily to any in-particular party, however, it would still be the cause of inaccurate reporting on the state of the election results. The purpose of voting in our Constitutional Republic is so we have accurate representation for We The People in Congress and the presidential administration. Without reliable voting, the odds of having representatives that are radicals with nothing in common with their constituents go up. This results in radicals on both sides of the aisle in positions of power, and either direction you go, Left or Right, if you go too far you are a threat to the preservation of our Republic.
Please, vote wisely. Your voice makes a difference. Left or Right, if you want to ensure your vote counts, you should vote in person. This is possibly the most important election in the history of our great nation. With the emerging Communist revolution across America, it is especially important to make your vote count. Put effort into researching the men and women running for Congress, and make an educated vote for whom you believe will be most beneficial to our country.
Call to Action:
- Get/stay INFORMED AND EDUCATED
- Watch/read news from BOTH SIDES.
- PROTECT your family and fellow Patriots
- Engage in CIVIL DISCOURSE
- REFUTE misinformation
- DO NOT fall into the Third Party trap. Remember Ross Perot is how Clinton got elected.
This is a civil war between Communism and America. There is no more Democrat vs Republican right now. America needs to be united in the party of Patriots who believe in our constitution and the inherent right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
The radical Left has thrown their hail Mary, and we need to get our heads in the game and intercept that pass before it’s too late. Whether or not you believe Orange Man Bad, The Republicans who followed President Donald J Trump are the only hope for remaining a constitutional republic.
NEVER FORGET: They are Rights enumerated to remind us and our government of our innate and indisputable liberties that are granted to us by our Creator, not our government; NEVER to be infringed or impinged upon by elected officials nor bureaucratic narcissists, ALWAYS as protection for We The People from tyranny and despotism at even the highest level of our hierarchical structure.
This page is a conservative-leaning blog that takes the facts from current events and gives objective information as well as my opinion on those facts. I am not an expert in any field, nor do I claim to give expert advice, but I will try to get you all of the evidence-based information I can find.
1https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/08/14/dr_fauci_there_is_no_reason_people_cant_vote_in_person_if_they_follow_safety_guidelines.html
2https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-in-person-voting/fact-check-fauci-said-there-is-no-reason-why-we-cant-vote-in-person-if-guidelines-are-followed-idUSKBN25U2BB
3http://baconbreaksitdown.com/2020/08/24/to-mask-or-not-to-mask/
4https://metrovoicenews.com/white-house-coronavirus-expert-dr-birx-says-let-churches-meet-and-people-vote-in-person/
5https://justthenews.com/video/dr-birx-says-person-voting-safe-starbucks
6https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
7https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/ese.14.33.19309-en#html_fulltext
8https://www.nytimes.com/article/mail-in-voting-explained.html
9https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
10https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/us-attorneys-office-says-fbi-discovered-discarded-military-ballots-cast
11https://www.courthousenews.com/california-trashes-thousands-mail-ballots-aclu-says/
12https://redstatenation.com/photos-man-in-california-allegedly-found-thousands-of-unopened-ballots-in-garbage-dumpster-workers-quickly-try-to-cover-them-up/
13https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/07/getting-a-ballot-in-the-mail-for-your-dead-relative-is-not-as-weird-as-it-seems/
14https://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146827471/study-1-8-million-dead-people-still-registered-to-vote
15https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2012/02/14/inaccurate-costly-and-inefficient-evidence-that-americas-voter-registration-system-needs-an-upgrade
16https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-vote-by-mail-in-every-state-11597840923
17https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/14/michigan-ballot-application-mailings-dead-people-raise-gop-hackles/5335580002/
18https://apnews.com/article/fbcec393dc652a9ccdb2cc8aacb15895
19https://www.lavote.net/home/voting-elections/voter-registration/register-to-vote/cancel-registration
20https://aria4sheriff.com/2020/09/a-time-of-self-reflection/
21https://vote.donaldjtrump
22https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/registration-status
3 thoughts on “In-Person Voting: Safe and Reliable”