Arguments for more mail ballots obliterated

The next time someone complains that relaxing Louisiana’s mail-in ballot rules won’t damage election integrity, you know they’re either ignorant or want to steal elections.

That’s the only conclusion drawable from a devastating piece that ran last week in the New York Post. It drew from remarks made by an anonymous New Jersey Democrat veteran political operative, whose pedigree the staff authenticated, who made it chillingly clear how easy and undetectable was committing voting fraud.

Mail-in ballots provide much fertile ground for fraud, he explained. Tricks he and others have used include:

•        New Jersey mail-in ballots have no special security features, so he would just copy them.
•        Envelopes do, so his organization, posing as a civic responsibility group, would fan out to doorsteps and tell voters they would mail in their ballots for free (in New Jersey, all voters automatically receive one). Then they would steam open the envelopes, discard the actual ballot, and substitute their own.
•        Then they would mail these, strategically. He never got caught because he would spread around the ballots from multiple mailing locations.
•        Also, you can rely upon confederates in the Postal Service. With its rabidly pro-Democrat union, he didn’t have trouble finding postal employees that, for example, knew that most ballots picked up in certain neighborhoods would vote Republican, so these would be discarded.
•        His organization also would fan out to nursing homes and offer to assist residents in filling out and mailing their ballots (New Jersey has no witness requirement). Better, he would coopt an employee or infiltrate one to do the dirty work.

He even utilized fraudulent voters on election day (New Jersey has no picture identification requirement.) As in Louisiana, public records exist of if and when registered voters cast ballots. He would cull names of extremely infrequent voters over the years, then send in operatives to impersonate them and crudely forge their signatures. In the rare instance one of the frequent nonvoters actually had voted prior to the impersonator’s request, the faker simply would hustle on out of the polling place.

Fortunately, Louisiana has much better security measures than New Jersey, but vulnerabilities still remain, particularly regarding the nursing home and postal worker gambits. The latter may explain why some 4,000 absentee ballots were held up in New Orleans prior to the Jul. 11 election, although the “official” but unverified explanation by the Postal Service is these were short postage. It would be interestingly to see whether postal rules were followed in uniform fashion, particularly if ballots that were short postage from areas like Gentilly or New Orleans East disproportionately were delivered and didn’t end up in this pile.

And the former? Well, just look at what happened in Crowley.

Don't forget as well that although Louisiana has a picture identification requirement, it can be circumvented. It also allowed a loophole for the previous two elections where one could register and vote without ever making a personal appearance and showing picture identification; look for Democrats to try to grandfather in these registrants for the fall elections in a likely special legislative session in about a month.

If anything, Louisiana then needs to tighten election laws by getting rid of the non-photograph/non-government identification loophole and invoking its ability to provide state photographed identification cards for free to all legal residents of voting age who don’t otherwise have one. But that wouldn’t do anything to alleviate potential mail-in ballot fraud.

Limiting it only can minimize that possibility. Those who advocate expanding it, now upon learning how that is exploited, reveal their ulterior and nefarious motive if they continue to insist on its expansion.