Cheating with Absentee Ballots
[4,180 views, 10/30. See also my posts on actual detected fraud and suspicious vote patterns in 2020 and the oppressor/oppressed reason Democrats would cheat]
In my previous Substack, I talked about how there is evidence of massive cheating in the 2020 election right before our eyes— some 330,000 votes. That is the number of absentee ballots rejected not for being late or some such technicality, but for three more suspicious reasons: (a) the voter tried to vote a second time in person or absentee, (b) the voter’s signature on record didn’t match the signature on the ballot envelope, or c) there wasn’t any signature at all. And before that I told you why I believe the 2020 election was stolen, and that you should vote for Trump in 2024 because of the oppressor/oppressed meme.
That’s just the cheating that was caught, of course. And even if every mismatch, double vote, and blank signature were caught, much of the cheating would remain, because it isn’t that hard to buy legitimate votes if they’re absentee ballots. Here’s how it would work. I am Republican Precinctman of the 19th Precinct of Perry Township, Monroe County, Indiana.1 I have a list of all the registered voters. If I were a better precinctman, I would know each of their individual political stances. I would pick one who I thought might sell his vote, and offer him $100 if he fills out the absentee voter application I give him and then votes for Trump when the ballot arrives.2 I would stand next to him as he writes everything, to make sure he didn’t forget anything. And in fact, the rejection rate of Rasmusen-bought ballots would be zero, helping to lower the state rejection rate and make naive people think that absentee balloting was working wonderfully. 3 I would collect all the envelopes to mail, so I could show them to my county chairman and he could pay me $20 per vote.
The mismatch and no-signature problems arise if I don’t get the voter to fill out everything. If I make it easy for him by filling out everything myself, maybe I can get his vote for $30 instead of $100. Or maybe he is illiterate and filling out his address is tough. Or maybe he is dead. So I’d sign his name for him or leave the signature line blank, hoping it will get by an election worker who is sleepy or Republican.
When I brought this up at my church small group meal yesterday, one man said, “I could have Nathan vote!” Nathan is a member of our small group who can’t talk or read and will need someone to take care of him for his entire life. He likes being in company, but he usually sits on the couch with a device of some kind listening to music or watching something on the screen (in which respect he is a perfectly normal young man). Nathan is about 22, I think, old enough to be registered. His dad could request an absentee ballot for him, and say, “Nathan, do you want to vote for Donald Trump?” Nathan would nod agreeably, and the box would be checked.
What I’ve just described is very illegal, though very hard to catch. There is another way to get the same result, though, which is legal and common. As precinctman, I could go around and make sure it’s very easy for my neighbors to apply for their absentee ballots and to send them in once they arrive. I show up with a cheerful smile and tell good jokes. I inquire after their dog’s health. I mention how much I hope they vote for Donald Trump. That is enough for a lot of people; no need to pay money. Or, rather edgier, I give each of them a Veteran’s Day turkey, just as a pure gift, no mention of politics at all.4 This will remind those of you who know a little American history of the job of ward heeler. There is no quid pro quo, so even if we call this vote buying, I’d never be convicted.5
So I think absentee voting is a bad idea, and I wouldn’t allow it except for people who are American citizens outside the border of the United States. That’s what most European countries do. You may say, “Everybody deserves a chance to vote!” Well, they do have a chance— they can vote in person. Nowadays, we even have early voting most places, so if you’re out of town on election day like my son the Purdue student you can choose a day you’re in town to vote. Moreover, we don’t let everybody vote. Some states ban felons, but I’m not thinking of that. A much bigger group of disenfranchised people are people under age 18. Should they vote? Maybe. One way to do it would be for the father to vote for the entire household, so I, with a wife and 3 unmarried children, would cast 5 votes.6 But most people don’t really believe in one man, one vote; they believe in restricting the franchise to adults.
A Procedure for Absentee Voting
I’m against absentee voting, but if we’re going to have it, we can improve its security. Honorable reader, you may wish to subscribe and leave at this point, because procedures bore most people. The way to make reading it interesting, if you continue, is to look with a keen eye for flaws in my scheme that would either make it too hard to vote or make it too easy cheat.
To apply to vote absentee, the voter submits an application that has his signature and a cheap copy of his ID. He can apply by mail or online; online, he would submit photos of his ID and dated signature. He should also write his post office address to match where he registered,7 and, if he wishes, his email address or texting number, and how he’d like his ballot: snailmail or email.
The election office gets the application and checks the ID and checks the signature against signatures on file from registering to vote, driver’s license, and anything else. The election office is allowed to “cure” the application by fixing the address to add a zip code or other missing information.
The ID and signature would be checked by AI— that is, by the computer seeing if they match what’s on file. Before the election, the AI is “tuned” to sort applications into two types: Match and NonMatch. Election officials have a public meeting at which they explain the tuning and show examples of match and mismarch, and their choice can be challenged in court if it’s crazy.
If the application is a Nonmatch, a message is sent to the voter by email, text, or snailmail, that someone applied for a ballot and that he can try again, to cure it, if it was really him.
If the application is a Match, an absentee ballot is sent to the voter.
The voter fills out the ballot, puts it in a little envelope, puts that in the outer return envelope along with a copy of his ID, signs the outer envelope and puts his address on it, and sends it back to the election office.8
The election office opens the outer envelope and checks the address and signature and ID. As with the application, the election office can have a policy of curing addresses.
AI does the first matching. In the same public hearing as for the application signature, the election office displays its tuning for the ballot signature, which is different. Now the three categories are Match, NonMatch, and Uncertain. The Uncertain category is for matches the Republicans and Democrats might fight over. If a signature is NonMatch or Uncertain when the real ballots are received, it is put aside for special consideration. Every few days, the election official, a Republican pollwatcher, and a Democratic pollwatcher all together look at that pile. If they all agree, the ballot goes to the Match or NonMatch pile. If any one disagrees, it goes to the Still Uncertain pile. A county judge has previously sent the three of them a court order requiring them to give their honest opinion in whether any of them declares a ballot Still Uncertain. The Still Uncertain ballots are kept with their outer envelopes.
The supposed voter is notified by snailmail9 that his ballot is in the NonMatch pile and he is given a chance to cure it or to say he didn’t send it and it was fraudulent.
The same county judge looks at the Still Uncertain pile after all the other ballots are counted. If there are enough of them to make a difference as to who wins, he decides which ones count, with the aid of Republican and Democrat lawyers as in a typical court case. Even if there aren’t enough to make a difference, he takes a casual look at them to see if the Still Uncertain categorization was honest. If he finds that, say, the Democrat pollwatcher frivolously said all the Uncertains were Still Uncertain, he holds a contempt hearing and puts him in jail for a month.
So there we are. I think these procedures would be better than what is currently being used. An elections expert told me that some states are already using AI as a first cut, to put ballots in the Match pile. Since 2020 many states have revised their absentee voting procedures. If you want to investigate, an excellent survey, with data and maps, of the 2020 procedures and the mismatch court cases is the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project report, “Behind the Scenes of Mail Voting: Signature Verification and Witness Requirements in the 2020 Elections” (March 10, 2021) by Ali Bloomgarden, Arushi Gupta, Garrett Jensen, Zahavah Levine, Chris Middleton, Kyra Sikora, and Zahavah Levine.
The prequel to this article is
I am a poor Precinctman. I’ve done practically nothing except show up for meetings, put signs in my hard, and wear my MAGA hat sometimes when I jog. I only ran (pun unintended), because there was no Republican Precinctman at all in my neighborhood, and I thought I couldn’t do worse than zero. I encourage you, honored reader, to think about getting involved in your local party machinery. In my county, the Republicans are in a sorry state.
$100 for a vote? Well, Hyde Park is an expensive neighborhood, with some million dollar houses, so my neighbors woudn’t sell their vote cheap.
Here I might cite one of the many people who use the unusually low absentee ballot rejection rates in the 2020 election as evidence that they system is working better than ever. Or I might not, if I’m too busy. You can email me a link, if you like. Why should the author have to do all the work?
This relies on the concept of “reciprocal altruism”: if you do something nice for me, I will want to do something nice for you and cancel the debt. This works even if you know I’m angling for something bigger than I’m giving; hence, the occasional reluctance in Korea or Japan to accepting gifts.
That is, I wouldn’t be convicted of buying votes with turkeys unless I put it in writing. Oops. Too late. I guess I’d better not do it.
Family voting brings up a controversial issue. If my wife is pregnant, can I vote on behalf of the unborn baby? If so, can I vote even the day after conception, or only after a week, or only after viability?
If the voter just puts his name and not his registration address, the election worker won’t know which “John Smith” he is.
A variant would be to not sign the outside of the outer mailing envelope, but to enclose a one-page form with the voters ID, signature, and address.
The fraudster might have put his own email address or phone number in the ballot application, so the voter’s post office address should be used for cure attempts.
California already follows a similar procedure, but uses county employees (almost always registrar staff) to do the human screening. There's an internal second review by more experienced and better trained supervisors, but no partisan citizen involvement or judicial involvement.
Where this system breaks down is in the ease of passing signatures by the first person that are at best uncertain without further review. I've watched tens of thousands of signatures get examined over weeks of processing, and most of the time most of the election workers were fair and pretty close to my judgment on almost all the signatures. But I did observe one staffer who was letting signatures go by that were clear non-matches, like printed signatures on the envelope when the original signature was in stylized cursive. I noted a bunch of his errors and emailed the Registrar about it. The staffer was reassigned to other election duties the next day. But there dozens of uncertain or nonmatch signature ballots that were sent to be opened and counted as a result of that one staffer's lack of attention or motivated decision-making, and once they're in the to-be-counted bins you can't readily go back and question them.
Yes it's better than existing procedures.
It doesn't fix the ward heeler standover problem, but then I'm not sure anything fixes that if you allow absentee voting in the first place. The voting booth was designed to prevent that problem by explicitly separating the voter from the heeler in front of witnesses, preventing both pressure from the heeler and the voter being able to prove that he voted "properly".