The Daily Signal - Why Mail-In Voting Is a Bad Idea, Even During a Pandemic

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

There is currently a debate raging over how elections are to be held in the fall amid the coronavirus. Is a pandemic reason to hold an election by mail? Would widespread mail-in voting lead to voter fraud and skew election results? Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a former member of the Federal Election Commission, joins the podcast to discuss how states across America can hold a free and fair election while also protecting individuals' health.  We also cover these stories: Former Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., passed away July 17 and is lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Robert O’Brien, national security adviser to President Trump has been diagnosed with COVID-19.  Google announced its employees will work from home through 2021. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, July 28th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Virginia Allen. There is currently a debate raging over how elections are to be held in the fall amid the pandemic. While mail-in ballots lead to more voter fraud, will we see a spike in COVID-19 cases if Americans go to the polls to vote? Hans von Spakovsky Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow joins the podcast to discuss the ramifications of mail-in voting and how we can ensure a safe and fair election in the fall. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.

Now on to our top news. Former Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, who died July 17th, is lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Colleagues of Lewis from the House and the Senate attended a ceremony on Monday honoring Lewis's life. Lewis, who served over three decades in the House, was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement and was among the first 13 freedom riders who were black and white activists in 1961 who fought segregated interstate travel in the south. Lubis's motorcade was driven past the Washington Monument, the MLK Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Black Lives Matter Plaza, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture before arriving at the capital per WUSA-9.

Robert O'Brien, National Security Advisor to President Trump, has been diagnosed with COVID-19. O'Brien is the highest-ranking White House official to contract the virus to date. Larry Cudlow, the president's economic advisor, told the press on Monday that O'Brien was infected by his daughter while taking a few days off to spend time with his family. O'Brien is now working remotely from his home with only mild symptoms. Everyone who works closely with the president is tested for coronavirus on a regular basis, and there appears to be no immediate concern that O'Brien could have exposed the president to the virus. Google announced Monday that the company is having its employees work from home through 2021.

I know it hasn't been easy. Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai wrote in a note to staff on Monday after the Wall Street Journal first reported the news. Alphabet is a subsidiary of Google. Pichai added, I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months. Two major league baseball games were postponed on Monday night after nine Miami Marlins players and five staff members tested positive for COVID-19. The Marlins were set to play Baltimore as one of the first games in the shortened 60 games season. The New York Yankees also called off their game against Philadelphia, because they would have been staying in the same clubhouse the Marlins used last week. Derek Jeter, the Marlin CEO, said in a statement that

the health of our players and staff has been and will continue to be our primary focus as we navigate through these uncharted waters. Postponing tonight's home opener was the correct decision to ensure that we take a collective pause and try to properly grasp the totality of this situation. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Hans von Spakovsky, as we discuss mail-in-voting, voter fraud, and the best way to ensure a safe and fair election in the fall. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear some of the biggest names in American politics speak? Every day, the Heritage Foundation hosts webinars called Heritage Events Live. Webinar topics range from ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic to the CARES Act and the Occas. These webinars are free and open to the public.

To find the latest webinars and register, visitheritage.org slash events. I am joined by Hans von Spikoski Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow. Hans, welcome back to the show. Sure, thanks for having me back. So we're facing a great debate in America right now around how the election in the fall should be held amid a global pandemic. and a lot of people are saying that we should have the entire election across all 50 states take place by mail. So let's just say hypothetically we did that. Every state voted in November by mail.

How would that impact the election, do you think? It would be complete chaos. Look, there's all kinds of problems with that whole concept and that whole idea. And also it's not necessary. But basically it's this. Just from a practical standpoint, there's simply no way that election officials in the 45 states who don't do all-male elections, currently there are five states that do that, including Washington Oregon, there's simply no way they could put in place the kind of structure and resources needed to suddenly handle literally tens of millions of absentee or mail-in ballots. Washington State, the Secretary of State,

there admits it took them five years to gear up and put the kind of structure in place that could handle all-male elections. So from just a practical standpoint, I don't think it could be done. It also, by the way, would delay election results for, who knows how long, because it takes much longer

to process mail ballots. But here's the other big thing. Mail and ballots are the ones that are most vulnerable to everything from election fraud, forgery, ballots being stolen out of people's mailboxes to misdelivery by the U.S. Postal Service to pressure and intimidation of voters in their homes. The Inspector General for the Postal Service just released a report on Wisconsin. Remember, they had a primary at April 7. And apparently, thousands of ballots were never delivered.

to voters by the U.S. Postal Service. So those folks missed out on their vote. There have been similar problems. D.C. recently had a primary. Maryland had recently had a primarily. They had the identical problem. The Postal Service did not deliver everyone's absentee ballots the way they needed. And that's just one of the many, many problems with the absentee ballot process.

So, but we hear this argument of, you know, people vote absentee during every election. and that's actually quite a common, you know, thing to have happen. But what is the difference between voting absentee versus voting by mail? Well, the difference is that in 45 states, in the District of Columbia where you vote in person, they also have the, you also have the ability to vote by absentee ballot. But that's usually a very small percentage of the vote. And nobody disputes that we need that for people who are physically disabled or sick or aren't to make it to the polls for another reason.

But in those situations, you as the voter have to request an absentee ballot. You fill out a form, you sign it, you send it to election officials. They have the ability to try to authenticate that you really are a real voter and you're the person who actually signed it. Voting by mail, what they're talking about is simply mailing an absentee ballot to every registered voter. Well, the problem with that is that. voter rolls across the country are in notoriously bad shape.

Not too many years ago, the Pew Foundation actually did a study and found that there were millions of people on the voter rolls still who are dead, that there are millions of people who are on the voter rolls who are registered in more than one state. If all of a sudden all these ballots are being mailed out and arriving in people's neighborhoods where those voters, they no longer live there, they've moved, or they're dead, they're dead, about their ballot arrives in the mail, those may get gathered up. They may get voted. Plus, again, you have the problem of the rejection rates of ballots or absentee or mail-in ballots

in comparison to in-person voting is higher. By rejection, I mean folks don't fill out all the information correctly. They don't provide all the information required by state law. So even if they complete the ballot, mail it back to election officials, it gets rejected. And the rejection rate, like said, is considerably higher for mail and ballots than when you vote in person where there's an election official there who can remedy a problem if one exists. Wow. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that because that's so easy to do when you're filling out some document. You miss a box. You forget to check something. You forget to

sign something. And then that cancels out. That voids your whole vote. That's really fascinating. Well, in fact, listen, right now there's an investigation going on in Patterson, New Jersey. They had municipal elections there a couple of weeks ago. They switched an all-mail election because everybody said, oh, you have to do that. They've already arrested four local individuals for engaging in apparently absentee ballot fraud. And the rejection rate because of the kind of problems we just discussed is close to 20%. That is a huge number of voters whose votes aren't going to count who have been disdemeanor. and franchise because they went to an all-male election.

Wow, that's amazing. Now, to what extent, as we talk about voter fraud, to what extent do we know, does voter fraud take place where it's sort of a crime of opportunity or maybe accidentally mailed a ballot for a family member who's deceased versus this is an organized crime that is maybe carried out by an organization or a larger group of people to actually sway the election? It's a matter of both of those kind of happenings. You know, we have an election fraud database at the Heritage Foundation that we started a couple

years ago. We're up to now almost 1,300 proven cases of fraud. And look, some of them are just, for example, particular voters taking advantage of the system. We added a college student last year who was convicted of voting in two states, which is illegal. He voted at the University of New Hampshire where he was going to school, but he also voted in Massachusetts where he actually lives. But then other cases are organized, like I said, the four individuals who were just arrested in Patterson, New Jersey, or just a week or so ago, a former Democratic congressman in Philadelphia, a guy named Michael Myers, was indicted by the U.S. attorney for ballot stuffing, bribery, and obstruction of justice. And apparently what he was doing was he was bribing a local election

official who works in a polling place to literally stuff the ballot box with fraudulent votes on behalf of folks running for office. These were the former congressman's clients. He's now a political consultant for both local offices, state offices, federal offices, and even judicial judgeships. Wow. That's crazy. goodness. And so it's wild to see that that's happening at every level of leadership, really. And one of the other things that I've been really fascinated to see is amidst COVID-19 and all the fears of people going to the polls and the pandemic, there's also been this push from the left

to do away with things like voter ID or signature checks for those mail-in ballots. But what does voter ID have to do with keeping people safe from COVID-19? I feel like there's a disconnect there. There is a disconnect, and it has nothing to do with it whatsoever. They're just trying to take advantage, and they really ought to be ashamed of that. They're trying to take advantage of the COVID-19 health crisis to change election laws in a way that they think will somehow help them, although what it really is intended to do is make it easier to cheat and easier to manipulate election result. Look, I'll give you another quick example of that. At the very same time, they're saying, oh, we've got to switch to all-male elections, to have social distancing and not to spread

of COVID-19. They've been pushing to make vote harvesting legal in every state, to override state laws that ban vote harvesting. Vote harvesting is when a state legalizes allowing anyone to come to your front door to say, hey, I'll pick up your absentee ballot and I'll deliver it for you to election officials. Well, what does that do? It means that candidates and campaign staffers and party activists, political consultants, people who have a stake in the outcome of the election can show up at your front door and offer to deliver your ballot. Well, talk about spreading COVID-19, having strangers who are going from one house to another showing up at your front door to offer to take your ballot, why in the world would they want to force states to allow that in the midst of COVID-19?

Yeah, wow. I want to talk about one situation that you addressed in a recent paper for the Heritage Foundation. And you discussed that in 2018, North Carolina had a very interesting incident of voter fraud in their ninth district. congressional election that actually resulted in the election being overturned and the whole election having to take place once again. So could you just explain a little bit more about what actually happened in that instance in North Carolina and any lessons that we should draw from that situation? Sure. Actually, North Carolina, fortunately, is one of the states that actually prohibits boat harvesting, but that did not stop a political consultant who was

hired by the Republican candidate who was running for. that congressional seat. It was the ninth congressional district. Now, I should say in all of this, there's been no indication that the candidate actually knew what the political consultant was doing. But in essence, this political consultant, who, by the way, was well known, the state he'd worked for prior candidates of both political parties. He and his staffers went to voters' homes, convinced them to request absentee ballots, would take the absentee ballot request forms back to their offices and photocopy them before turning them in over to election officials. And then when the absentee ballots were being sent out, they did everything from pressure voters

to vote for their candidate to falsifying the witness signatures to apparently forging the signatures of the voters themselves, which they could now easily do. Why? Well, because they had photocopies of the absentee ballot request forms and therefore had the voter's signature. They did this to hundreds of voters, so many voters that the state board of elections overturned the election because of the fraud that had occurred and they held a, had to hold a new election. And that guy, by the way, and six of his staffers have been indicted and charged with fraud in that election. So I think, you know, when we hear stories like that,

you would hope that kind of our leaders and all of us as society would kind of take from that like, okay, this has been tried, it doesn't work, we need to find a different option. But instead what we're seeing is that there's this continued push of, no, we need to pursue voting by mail. Yeah, and look, there's, look, I understand people wanting to be careful that we should be in the midst of COVID-19. But, look, the CDC, right, the Centers for Disease Control, that's the agency, everybody's been looking to for how to handle this. Look, they put out guidelines at the end of June specifically for election officials on how to safely conduct in-person voting. And it's got in it all the same safety precautions that we're all observing when we go to the grocery store and our pharmacies. In essence, you know, they're telling election officials make sure voters are spaced out.

You know, six feet social distancing in line. People are wearing masks. Be sure you have sanitation stations that you're cleaning materials and voting booths before and after voters use them. And if you follow all that, then you can safely vote. We know that we can safely vote because other jurisdictions have had in-person voting in the midst of COVID-19, by the way, and have done so safely. Wisconsin, April 7th, they had several.

hundred thousand people vote in person. They put all those safety protocols in place. There was no spike in COVID-19 infections. Similarly, just very quickly, South Korea actually held national elections. On April 15th, 29 million South Koreans voted using all these same safety protocols. And again, the health experts there report, there was no spike in COVID-19 infections. Wow. Wow. So who are the key players that make the decision of this is how we will hold the election, whether in person, by mail, using both means? Well, it depends on the election. It depends on the state. You know, for municipal elections, that's usually town officials. For state elections, that's either state legislators, the state secretary of, state who's usually the chief election official or county election officials because in almost all the states elections are actually run at the county level. In some states, governors have been trying

to dictate how elections are held, particularly primaries, and they've ended up in court. And the courts have ruled different ways depending on how much power the state constitution gives to the governor, the governor of Wisconsin, for example, when he tried to change. things for the Wisconsin primary that was held April 7th, the court's rule that he didn't have the power to do that. So it really depends on the state. The one entity that has nothing to say about this surprisingly for a federal election is the federal government. Fascinating. Now, are there states that have already said for sure we are going to hold the election in November all by mail? No one has quite finalized that yet. The governor of

California, Governor Newsom, actually has tried to do that. He issued an executive order saying it was going to be an all-male election, but again, folks have sued saying, you can't do that, governor, you don't have the power to, and that's currently being litigated in the court. And in fact, that is not unusual. There have been more lawsuits filed this year over the election and the rules governing it than I have ever seen in my entire career, or up to 150 lawsuits, if you can believe it, all over the country, and even more are still being filed. And why do you think this is such a partisan issue, Hans? Because it really does seem to be that it's right down party lines. Look, it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be a partisan issue,

but it has become that way. And look, all I can say is that it's liberals who are trying to to force states to get rid of the kind of safety protocols they have in place to try to protect the entirety election process, like bans on vote harvesting and signature comparison requirements for absentee ballot. So my only conclusion is that they're like said, they're trying to make it easier to manipulate election results and easier to cheat, which is very, very unfortunate. What is your recommendation? How can we hold the elections in November in a way that, you know, are fair and just, and we have the most accurate results, but yet we are prioritizing the safety of those individuals, the elderly population, who might not feel safe going to the polls.

Well, I think election officials all over the country need to work as hard as possible at making sure as many polling places are open as they can. They need to avoid the mistake, for example, the District of Columbia made in their recent primary. They normally have 100 polling places open. They decided to try to encourage as many people to vote by absentee ballot as possible, and they would only have 20 polling places open. Well, many voters didn't receive their absentee ballots. They weren't delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. So they went to their polling places to vote, and of course what happened with such a much smaller number of polling places, they ended up having to wait in the line for hours to vote. So election officials need to make sure as many

polar places are open as possible. I would hope they could get all the regular normal number open, of course, put in the health safety protocols that the CDC is recommending. And yet, to the extent that you have people most at risk, which as we know is the elderly and those with immune deficiency problems, yeah, I mean, they should be able to vote by absentee ballot, but they should request an absentee ballot to and not just have them automatically mail to them. I think if they follow those two things, I think we should have a normal and a regular type of election in November.

Hans, thank you so much for your time today. We just really appreciate you breaking down this issue for us. Well, thanks for having me. It's always great talking to you. And that will do it for today. episode. Thank you for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. Please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And please leave us a review or rating on Apple Podcasts and give us your feedback. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow.

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