I was riding my bike the other day and I found a wallet on the side of the road. It contained just over a hundred bucks, some credit cards and a driver’s license. I was on the backside of my ride and only a few miles from home, so I stuck it in my pocket and finished my ride.
When I got home, I had a dilemma: How do I get the wallet back to the owner? The address on the license was about 15 miles away from my house. I had no way of knowing if he still lived at the address on his license so I didn’t want to mail it to him. If I sent it to that address and he no longer lived there, it might fall into the hands of someone quite as nice as me who might just pocket the cash and toss the rest.
So, I called the number on the back of his Capital One card. I told the representative that I had found the cardmember’s wallet and asked if she could call him and give him my phone number so we could arrange to get him back his wallet. She said she couldn’t do that, but she would take down my information and it would be “in the report”. Then she cancelled his cards.
I figured he’d be notified by Capital One and call me that evening. If he didn’t call me then I would conclude that Capital One never passed along my information. There was no call.
So, I hopped in my car and drove to his house. When no one answered the doorbell, I looked in his mailbox and saw that the mail in the box had his name and address on it. I felt safe that I could leave his wallet in the mailbox and it would get to the right person. So that’s what I did. [Yes, I realize that was technically illegal.]
On my drive back home, I realized something: I put more effort into making sure that the right person got the driver’s license than the State of California does making sure the right person gets a ballot.
The mail-in-voting process here in California is really messed up. Ballots are being stolen from mailboxes, found in the trash, delivered to the wrong people and some have even been delivered to dead people. Some people have reported receiving multiple ballots. This week, more than 2,000 residents of Woodland Hills received ballots that didn’t include the presidential race. Clearly there are some huge issues with the process.
It’s not just California. Similar examples are being reported in many locations across the United States. The claim that there is no vote-by-mail fraud is ridiculous. Though, to be accurate, the claim typically made is that there are few “proven” cases of vote-by-mail fraud.
But, voting fraud isn’t limited to using someone else’s ballot. Voting fraud can be committed by simply discarding someone’s ballot. So, every single instance of a ballot being found in the trash or found abandoned by a mail carrier is a proven case of voting fraud. Vote-by-mail fraud is real, and it exists.
You might think that the numbers are small. And you’d be correct. Out of the more than 100 million ballots mailed this year, only a small fraction have been misdelivered or stolen. So, we shouldn’t worry too much. Right?
But what if your ballot is one that gets discarded? What if you are the disenfranchised voter? Would it matter to you then? If your right to vote had been taken away from you for no reason other than that you trusted the system, I suspect you’d be very upset. And you should be.
So, let’s not pretend that vote-by-mail is a perfect system. Because it isn’t. Let’s not pretend that there is no fraud with mail-in voting. Because there is. Let’s stop thinking that the number is so small that it doesn’t matter. Because it does.
We shouldn’t be wondering if there is a systemic problem with mail-in voting. It’s obvious that many issues with the process exist. The question is no longer “Does fraud exist?”. The real question is “How much fraud is there?”.
