Asunción “Sunny” Hostin, a co-host of The View on ABC, accidentally exposed what’s wrong with absentee and mail-in voting on Tuesday while telling a story about how she voted absentee on behalf of her son. After being admonished by Whoopi Goldberg for looking at her phone, Hostin explained that it was her son texting her to make sure she took care of his absentee ballot.
“I had trouble actually voting for him — absentee ballot — today,” she explained, “and that made me very concerned.”
According to Hostin, rather than take the ballot to an official, secure ballot box, she was told to put it in a bag.
“I was told to put it in an orange bag on the floor, and the orange bag looked, to me, like a Target bag or something. And I said, ‘Isn’t there a formal election box that says absentee ballots or something like that?’ And then she said, ‘Let me check,’ and then found it. So that concerned me.”
"I had trouble actually voting FOR HIM, absentee ballot today."
Sunny admits she voted absentee in place of her son and whines that she had trouble doing it.
"And that made me very concerned." She warned that they were putting them in an orange bag instead of an official box. pic.twitter.com/l3MLJ7CcuV— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) November 8, 2022
Some people have suggested that Hostin actually accidentally admitted to voter fraud by submitting an absentee ballot on behalf of her son. That is likely not the case. I’ve done some digging and found that her son is approximately 20 years old, which means he’s probably in college. I don’t know where, but it could be out of state or not near their official residence, so he may have a legitimate reason for voting absentee.
As to whether Sunny Hostin can legally drop off her son’s ballot, that’s not entirely clear. Most states do have provisions explaining who can submit a ballot on behalf of another person, but New York, where The View is filmed and where Hostin presumably lives, doesn’t clarify this point in their election laws. So, while I can’t confidently say that Hostin committed voter fraud (I’m inclined to say that she didn’t), she did nevertheless prove that absentee voting and voting by mail are not secure.
Related: People Who Can’t Fill Out an Absentee Ballot Correctly Shouldn’t Have Their Votes Counted
For starters, there’s no reason why her son, even if he is living out of state for college, couldn’t have requested an absentee ballot himself and mailed it from school. There’s no reason why Hostin had to play any part in that process or why she waited until Election Day to turn it in.
But her story about the bag on the floor is what really got to me, because it shows how little election workers understand or care about the proper chain of custody and secure containment of absentee and mail-in ballots. Which is exactly the problem Republicans have been pointing out for years.
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