https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
> Yet 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.
You could say that 1% increase in problems is small, but in close elections that could easily be considered huge.
> 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. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone..... ....living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
This is also patently false - they're sending out ballots to registered voters, not everyone regardless of how they got there.
> That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
Who are these "professionals"?
I thought that according to the right, Americans were perfectly capable of making life / death decisions for themselves and those around them during an active pandemic. So a trivial thing such as misinformation should be easy to deal with for them.
They’re called “campaigns.”
And they work especially well on the kind of people who think Trump’s posture of outrage is in response to genuinely outrageous behavior.
(Disclaimer: I am pro mail-in voting and lean leftist in my political beliefs. I am merely disagreeing that there are no pushes to encourage people to vote that are also anti-trump.)
So basically he is afraid of more people voting? Like how is a election where more people then ever vote rigged? Like wtf.
This might fall in line with the analysis of <forgot name sorry> which claimed that election results are more based on which people vote and which don't then on swing voters and that swing voters are pretty much irrelevant.
If this is true and it turns out that an majority of voters in the US is more on the side of the democrats then a voting method which makes more people vote could indeed cause a long term defeat of the republicans in a fair democratic non rigged manner!
Lets say the states decide to send out mail in ballots to all members of a house hold. A parent intercepts the ballots and fills them out on behalf of the kids or grandparents, or even the previous tenants. All of a sudden casting multiple votes becomes much easier by a single person.
In a more cynical situation, the ballots are intercepted and returned filled out by party members.
"The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state" is a specific claim, and would need to be supported. It's a different category of claim than merely boasting "I am the best president".
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent
Translation: 100% certainty that Mail-In Ballots are substantially fraudulent
Where do you get the 2% from?
> Maybe he thinks 2% is “more than substantially”
We don’t know what he thinks - we know what he wrote. And he didn’t write a “maybe 2% chance of fraud”
He specified a 100% certainty of substantial election fraud
States like Oregon and Washington have systems in place to make sure every ballot is counted. You get 18 days to send in your ballot, you can check online to see if your ballot has been received. If not, you have plenty of time to request a new one.
Oregon has been voting by mail for almost 20 years. In that time they have sent out about 100M ballots with only 12 cases of voter fraud found.
But here is what people seem to gloss over -- Yes, Oregon has been voting by mail for almost 40 years in fact. But it wasn't just done overnight. In fact, the process started before most here were born; in 1981 mail-in voting was allowed at the local level[0], and it wasn't until 6 years later that it was determined to be something Oregon would do every year. And it wasn't until 2000, nearly 20 years later, that presidential elections were included.
What we're talking about for this election cycle is drastically and suddenly switching the method of voting, not phasing it in over 40 years like Oregon did. When you make a drastic change like that, the situation is ripe for failure and abuse, because the people and systems in place are not equipped to handle the situation. Frankly, they don't even know what they're getting into until they're into it, and a major election is not the time to find out that the whole system is messed up.
Oregon may have taken a long time as it was a leader. Charting the unknown. States enabling more mail in voting now have well established examples to follow. Its hardly "drastically" changing anything.
Edit. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Oregon#Balloting
Ballots packs are mailed to every registered voter 14 to 18 days before the election. When the ballot pack comes in the mail, it includes:
An official ballot
A secrecy envelope
A ballot return envelope
Once received, an Elections Official at the elections office where the ballot is received will compare the signature on the ballot return envelope to the signature on the voter registration card to verify that the voter is registered to vote. Once verified, the secrecy envelope containing the actual ballot is removed and polled with the other ballots. Once the "polls" close at 8pm on Election Day, the ballots are removed from their secrecy envelopes and counted.
Seriously. I am getting a "we have always been at war with East Asia" vibe from this latest uproar.
If you use Google search tool to look up "mail-in voting fraud" and limit the search to before April 1st, you get a lot of concerned articles from NPR, NY Times, Propublica, etc, that mail-in voting fraud is a problem to worry about, and that expanding mail-in voting might lead to more fraud (and they also think Republicans will benefit from this expansion): https://www.google.com/search?q=mail-in+voting+fraud&source=...
But then Trump tweets about and there is a 180 and now it is disinformation to claim that a massive increase in mail-in voting will lead to a massive fraud problems.
Two old quotes are interesting to me:
From NY Times in 2012:
> “Absentee voting is to voting in person,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has written, “as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”
From Pro Publica in March 2020 ( https://www.propublica.org/article/voting-by-mail-would-redu... ):
> “To move from a couple of thousand to a couple of million requires an entirely different infrastructure,” said Tammy Patrick, a former county election official who is now a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund in Washington, D.C.
Just from those two quotes, it is not at all unreasonable to extrapolate and predict that massively increasing mail-in voting on a tight schedule is going to be a huge fricking problem. I don't know what the answer is, and I don't which party is going to benefit more. And even if you think Trump is wrong, he is still making a prediction that is based on real concerns, which is something that politicians do all the time, it is not a blatant error of fact.
If other states see higher problem rates in their vote by mail, it's likely a selection effect due to vote by mail being not the main method.
"Statistics show." Yeah, no, that's not how it works. Evidence shows, and there isn't any, or the New York freaking Times would describe it.
There's no justification at all for that tweet. He's saying that mail-in votes will lead to substantially fraudulent elections, eroding the trust in the process. One could even consider what he's saying as dangerous to the democratic system itself.