Despite fraud concerns, voting-by-mail for November general election could be approved this week

By Guy Page

The Vermont Secretary of State’s Office hopes to reach an agreement with Gov. Phil Scott this week to institute universal voting-by-mail for the Nov. 3 general election.

The SOS plan would require all town and city clerks to mail ballots to all registered voters. Votes could be returned by mail, or (pandemic permitting) delivered in person to the town/city office or cast at the polls in the traditional manner.

Vote-by-mail critics worry: can voter fraud be avoided? Saying the risk is minimal, the Secretary of State’s Office argues its plan is necessary to protect voter safety and access if another Covid-19 wave strikes in the fall.

“If we wait and run November as an absentee-ballot-by-request election, we fear that town clerks will be overrun with ballot requests and/or we will see a repeat of what just happened in Wisconsin, with long lines, unnecessary exposure, and worst case, as happened in Wisconsin, infected poll workers and voters,” Deputy Secretary of State Chris Winters warned in an email to the Chronicle of the Vermont State House. “We hope we will get agreement from the Governor this week and can set our plans in motion.”

Guy Page

At his press conference today, Gov. Scott said he has told the Secretary of State’s Office about his concerns about the SOS plan, which are practical and not political or philosophical. In particular, he’s wondering about the printing schedule for ballots that cannot be printed until after the Aug. 11 primary.

How and why did Vermont’s vote-by-mail plan happen?

Think back to Town Meeting, two months and the proverbial lifetime ago. On March 3 we never dreamed it could be unsafe to return on Nov. 3. Then the pandemic hit. Secretary of State Jim Condos and the Legislature responded quickly. The first Covid-19 emergency law (passed March 13) gives Condos authority to require all town and city clerks to mail primary and general election ballots to every registered voter.

Under Act 92, 2020 could be the year every ballot is mailed to voters and many if not most are returned by mail as well. The new law says:

The Secretary of State is authorized, in consultation and agreement with the Governor, to order or permit, as applicable, appropriate [for health and safety, these] elections procedures:

(1) requiring mail balloting by requiring town clerks to send ballots by mail to all registered voters;

(2) creating early or mail ballot collection stations;

(3) permitting municipal clerks to process and begin counting ballots in a 30-day window preceding the day of an election;

(4) permitting drive-up, car window collection of ballots by election officials;

(5) extending the time for municipal clerks to process and count ballots; and

(6) extending voting hours on the day of an election.

Why mail votes just for the general election in November, and not the Aug. 11 primary? 

Universal voting-by-mail will not be used for the Aug. 11 primary. “We do not think it would be possible to mail every voter a ballot for the primary in August and that the turnout for the primary (20-25%) does not pose the same risk as the high turnout we expect for the general (65%),” Winters said.

What about voter fraud?

Voting at the polls is an exercise in real-time government oversight. An in-person voting official hands you a ballot, another checks off your name, another watches you enter and exit the booth, another checks off your name again, and another collects the ballot or watches you feed it into a voting machine. By contrast, mailed voting has none of those eyes-on protections. The ballot leaves the town office. The ballot is returned. What happened in between is completely unknown.

That unsupervised gap, that period of the unknown, worries Vermont election watcher Rob Roper.

“Voting by mail as presently practiced cannot guarantee that the secret ballot and one person/one vote is actually taking place,” Roper, president of the Ethan Allen Institute, wrote in a recent column.

Roper cited the hypothetical example of uber-billionaire Warren Buffet and his secretary. At the polls, his vote counts no more or less than hers. Not so with mailed voting, in which Buffet could apply economic and other pressure to influence his secretary. Even if she complained, it would be her word against his.

“We can’t know in this case, for example, that Buffet didn’t use his power and wealth to bribe his secretary to vote a certain way or threaten to fire her if she didn’t. The more we rely on absentee ballots, the more inequity we build into the system as it allows for the rich and powerful, either individuals or organizations, avenues and opportunities to buy or bully votes. The poor and elderly are the most likely to be victimized under such a system,” Roper said.

Condos noted Vermont already has voluntary absentee mailed-in voting.  Anyway those hypotheticals virtually never happen, he insisted. “Without any changes to our laws, Vermont currently allows early absentee voting to any registered voter that requests a ballot.  Approximately 30% of our votes have been cast by early ballot in the last two general election cycles,” he said in an April 20 email to the Chronicle of the Vermont State House. “There is simply no evidence, and to my knowledge there has not been a single accusation in my time as Secretary of State, of someone returning a voted ballot on another person’s behalf. Not one in more than a decade.”

Condos claimed “there is zero evidence that widespread voter fraud exists. On the contrary – multiple non-partisan studies have found that voter fraud is exceptionally rare, including a study by the Brennan Center which found that occurrences of voter fraud were infinitesimally small, occurring between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.They have also found that, despite the increase in ballots cast by mail over time, in both states like Vermont, and in full vote-by-mail states like Oregon or Washington, fraud rates remained infinitesimally small.

Voter fraud is a serious criminal offense,” Condos said. “However, and fortunately, it is exceedingly rare. More common is the use of baseless voter fraud claims to discredit election outcomes, and to drive a personal political agenda.”

And yet large-scale voter fraud does occur, Roper said. “This is what happened in the North Carolina 9th, a U.S. congressional district with a bigger population than the entire state of Vermont, when the 2018 results were nullified by a court due to the decisive level of “vote harvesting” of absentee ballots. Vote harvesting is when campaign operatives show up on someone’s doorstep who has just received an absentee ballot (sometimes requested by that same campaign operative without the knowledge of the voter) and offers to “help”, threaten or bribe the voter fill out the form in a pre-determined way. In some cases the operative would just steal the ballot right out of the mailbox. In the NC-9 race, not only were fraudulent absentee votes for the cheating candidate turned in, legitimate votes for his opponent were collected and destroyed before they ever got into the hands of election officials.”

“If Vermont is going to rely increasingly on absentee ballots in elections, Secretary of State Jim Condos and members of the legislative Government Operations Committees need to be able to demonstrate that the kind of vote harvesting schemes that took place in North Carolina, and other districts to less dramatic effect, cannot happen here,” Roper said. “And they need to show in detail exactly how the safeguards work in practice to ensure that they don’t. If reliable safeguards are not in place now, they need to be by the August primary and November general elections.

“It’s not enough to scoff and say it’s not an issue and “our elections will be safe and secure,” Roper warned. “It is an issue. We’ve seen it happen.”

Read more of Guy Page’s reports

Image courtesy of Public domain

10 thoughts on “Despite fraud concerns, voting-by-mail for November general election could be approved this week

  1. We all know the reason behind this. That’s why the primaries are not important although they take place during the supposed dangerous timeframe. The party that has been pushing for mass voter registration has done the math on this and know that between the voter fraud and lack of oversight they will be able to manufacture a win for their candidate. Their last attempt to sabotage the election failed as did their other attempts to undermine our election system.

  2. Open the polls! Fight DNC voter fraud or the republic will be lost. The science is clear and lockdowns are unconstitutional. This link was removed from YouTube… A press conference by two California physicians. Please watch and share with friends and family.

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/pSZekTwJeIWX/

  3. I’m waiting for the Legislature to pass this and Scott to sign the act so I can report it to the Department of Justice and request action be taken against state government. The 2020 election is federal and Vermont cannot determine on its own how ballots will be cast.

  4. Wouldn’t the simple answer be for town and city clerks to mail out ballots to everyone on the check list and tell them that the ballot has to be mailed back to the town or city. Besides, the USPO could use the business.

  5. This was all part of their plan for cOvid. They have to pass it quickly because the world is going to find out what a hoax this whole thing really is.

    There are so many safe ways this could have been done, so many better ways, but we are only offered one solution and quickly, we don’t want any discussion on this.

    I wonder what the recourse will be in 2022 for Vermont?

    This year the world we be going toward freedom, not so for Vermont, we’re headed down socialist row. Perhaps there will be a complete collapse of things and a snap back to reality?

  6. Why not drop the ballots from low-flying planes?
    Anyone could pick one up and mail it in
    Dem/Probs would be very happy with that.
    They would send out teams to gather the ballots off the streets and fields
    Every evening there would be a ballot-filling-in party.
    Such joys.
    Happy days are here again and again
    Condos would present us with one of his big, sincere GRINS In the Media.
    BALLOT SHOULD ONLY BE SENT TO A VOTER AFTER A SIGNED REQUEST BY THE VOTER AND NOT SOONER THAN THE FISRT WEEK OF OCTOBER.
    By that time the virus scare in Vermont likely would have become a non event

  7. Amazing. The dictators are that worried about the Nov. election. The fraud will extend far beyond the usual.

  8. Terrible idea. Really terrible. This will lead to ballot harvesting and voter fraud. To say otherwise is naive in the extreme. Democrats absolutely cannot give us iron-clad guarantees that this will not happen. Vote in person unless you have a legitimate excuse like illness or travel. Then request an absentee ballot from your local town clerk. There is no need to mass mail everyone a ballot. Some of the people who get their hands on mailed ballots that will have no safeguards will not be the legitimate recipients entitled to vote that ballot. Bet on it. Phil Scott, shame on you for not standing forcefully against this scheme. As Democrat operative Rahm Emmanuel once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

  9. For me, to talk about this now is way too early. I think the Democrats are pushing it because there is such a possibility for fraud and they relish getting more control. I am definitely against mail-in voting – no matter what happens. Vermont should not still be shut down, given the data of the minimal effect the virus has had in the State. What is REALLY going on here? Governor Scott needs to put the lid on this.

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