Mail-in voting delays the count, opens up elections to suspicion and conspiracies, and undermines those elected to serve. But it’s become another government entitlement.
by Ken Reid
FALLS CHURCH – I’m sitting in a conference room in Falls Church City Hall, joined by another election officer (she the Democrat; me the Republican), opening up hundreds of envelopes containing mail-in ballots.
Our job is to look at the declaration form on the inner envelope containing the ballot, and if the voter required assistance to fill out the ballot or to show identification, we have to make sure the form is in there. If not, the city elections board will call the voter to get the ballot “cured” – a process the city was doing all along before state law required it.
About half the ballots were mailed, the other half dropped in drop boxes at City Hall. The one in the parking lot seems secure, locked down; the one in the lobby, well, it can be easily opened in the back, but I am assured security cameras are rolling—as they are on us handling these ballots.
Once we confirm the declaration, and at times having to check the voter rolls, we open the ballot and drop it in one of those big US Mail bins. We then count the ballots to be sure they equal the envelopes, and this is recorded in ink on a paper sheet. Each outer envelope and declaration gets numbered, too – but not the ballot itself.
While there is a political party observer watching, the key thing is what happens AFTER we leave.
That’s when the ballots are run into the scanners. I think there is a Democrat and Republican observer for this process, but at least the registrar is there to observe. I guess the elections officer, like me, can stay, but we’re not being paid for this part.
We’ve already reached 45% of registered voters voting early, much by mail or drop box. We have to divide the ones put in the drop boxes at City Hall and those that were mailed in. We open each one, look at the declaration to see if all the required information is there, and then we open the ballot and drop it in a US Post Office bin.
Each mailing and ballot envelope get marked with the same number “D” for drop box, “M” for mail. The ballot is not marked, so it stays secret.
It’s unreal to see the ages of the mail-in and drop off ballots – it’s not just the elderly, but the very young. Voters must put their birth year on the declaration containing the ballot – and a number of these voters are just 18-20 years old.
I wonder – why can’t they get off their duffs and vote in person, given that we have six weeks of early in-person voting in Virginia?
And then there are the UOCAVA ballots – The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act — which provides for ballots to be emailed to registered voters overseas, mainly military and State Department employees.
These are the most frustrating, because the voter has to print the ballot out on their end and mail it to Falls Church City Hall. Ballots are often taped inside in a way that takes five minutes to open them, and there is no declaration page with their full city address, birth year, etc. So, we have to go into the “poll book” and mark off if the voter is actually registered.
And the ballots themselves cannot be machine tabulated because the Virginia Board of Elections never gave the vendor approval to send a scannable ballot to these folks.
They have to be hand-counted on election day, and we’re looking at about 300 of them. Statewide, there could be 50,000, according to election registrars I have spoken with. All have to be hand-counted, primarily during the day.
Besides failing to approve a scannable ballot, why not work with the federal government’s ID system to allow voters to email them back securely and be counted electronically? Virtually all these voters have government issued “CAC” or “PIV” cards to facilitate that.
Texas allows overseas voters to vote by FaceTime or Zoom as long as they sign a statement saying they waive their right to a secret ballot.
But AI and “virtual assistants” people could vote that way too and vote secretly. So, why can’t Virginia do that, too, especially given the large number of citizens here who are in the military or diplomatic corps?
Isn’t all this paper a bit dangerous and subject to human error, especially sticking mail-in ballots into the scanners one by one -– unless some electoral boards can use an automatic document feeder? I don’t know.
What’s really crappy about this expansion of mail-in early voting is the delay in getting the results, which in a presidential election, and knowing how conspiracy theorists are with social media, only sows seeds of doubt about the outcome.
Democrats, who created this system in Virginia and other states under the guise of the COVID emergency, probably don’t want to admit that unrestricted mail-in voting leads to “election denial,” but all they cared about was making it as easy as possible for people to vote so Democrats can hit them with mail, phone calls, texts and even personal visits to get them to vote their sample ballot.
Republican early voting has certainly increased in this election, but the process of “ballot chasing” and “ballot harvesting” benefits the Democrats since most of their voters live in more concentrated cities and suburbs, whereas Republican voters are in more rural areas where there is less concentration of voters.
Some 80 million have voted, about half the total turnout in 2020, not all mail-in – but quite a lot. Arizona and Nevada, two battleground states, have virtually all mail in voting. We won’t know those results until Monday.
Pennsylvania politicians couldn’t come to agreement to allow mail-in ballots to at least be counted ON election day, so we may not know results there for days – and thus, the paranoiacs will suspect “fraud.”
But no-excuse mail-in voting is going to be hard to take away, even if Trump and the GOP win handily, thus making Democrats think twice about this stupid system.
That’s because being able to vote by mail, no matter how able you are, has become a kind of entitlement: a means for the government to hold your hand so you only have to fill in the black boxes on the ballot and the election officers will take care of the rest
And it’s going to be very hard to take this entitlement away, much like trying to repeal Obamacare, or reform Social Security and food stamps.
Besides the potential for errors –- note, I did not say “fraud” because I don’t believe “fraud” and stealing exists in sufficient number — nobody talks about the cost of all of this to the taxpayer.
What’s the cost of having satellite voting stations open a month or more in advance, and hiring people like me (at $20 an hour), to do all this handwork, only to have the most-critical part of the process (scanning and counting) occurring after we all leave the conference room?
Nobody also wants to talk about how unfair and difficult this is for candidates and how long voting periods and mail-in ballots only raises the cost of candidates reaching voters. I believe the 2022 congressional mid-terms cost $6 billion (both parties combined) and Kamala Harris is expected to break $1 billion just on her presidential effort.
There are now consultants you can hire to do ballot chasing and harvesting. It’s no longer “Election Day” but “Election Month.”
I don’t like six weeks of early voting like we have in Virginia, but apparently, it was always allowed for mail-in ballots since the UOCAVA law gives overseas voters six weeks. But in-person voting for the rest of us didn’t start until three weeks prior to the Democrat takeover of Richmond in 2020. Indeed, turnout has improved (but primarily for federal races).
But my guess is that if legislators try to monkey with this system, unless there is some clear-cut irregularity or PROVEN FRAUD, no legislature will want to take away this new mail-in ballot entitlement.
And, I also don’t see Congress stepping in with national standards either.
Back to counting, folks….
Ken Reid, lives in McLean. He has served on the Leesburg Town Council and Loudoun Board of Supervisors (2006-2017). He has attended numerous Republican county and state elections and was a Trump delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Republican National Convention. He is the author of “The Six Secrets to Winning Any Local Election – and Navigating Elected Office Once You Win.”
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