CBS News decided to test the system upon which the government will entrust the sanctity of the ballot this November. And the U.S. Postal Service flubbed it.
This is not about gaming the system, or voter fraud, or stuffing the mail with fake ballots from illegal aliens. This is about the competency of the USPS to deliver official ballots sent through the mail on time, and to the right people. They proved that the 100 million or more Americans who plan to mail in their ballots should not expect their vote to be counted unless they mail it weeks prior to the election deadlines in each state.
And even then there’s no guarantee it will be processed and counted.
The parameters of the test were simple and straightforward. CBS mailed 100 ballots to locations across Philadelphia in an experiment to see how long it took the ballots to arrive. A post office box was set up to receive the returned ballots.
A few days later, another 100 ballots were mailed to another 100 locations in the city. The results should frighten Democrats who claim they are all about “every vote being counted.”
A week after initial ballots were sent, most ballots appeared to be missing from the P.O. box.
“I don’t see anything back there for you,” a postal worker told Dokoupil when he received the mail. “That’s all I have back there right now.”
After asking for a manager and explaining the situation to them, the votes were found.
“They had them somewhere else,” the postal worker said.
Ho-hum, well, no one is perfect. That’s the point, isn’t it?
The mysterious problems at the local post office also included missorted mail.
“We got a birthday card from Mike to Ronnie,” Dokoupil said, as he read a postcard mistakenly placed in “CBS This Morning’s” P.O. box. “Have a sweet b-day. Get it? There’s a bee on top.”
The postcard, along with another piece of missorted mail, was then sent to the correct recipient.
In the end, the tally of late, misdirected, and missorted mail should concern anyone interested in the integrity of our elections.
Out of the initial batch mailed a week earlier, 97 out of 100 votes had arrived. Three simulated persons, or 3% of voters, were effectively disenfranchised by mail by giving their ballots a week to arrive. In a close election, 3% could be pivotal.
Four days after mailing the second batch of mock ballots, 21% of the votes hadn’t arrived.
According to Postal Service recommendations, “voters should mail their return ballots at least one week prior to the due date.”
However, nearly half of all states still allow voters to request ballots less than a week before the election.
Democrats who are pushing this notion that a mail-in election won’t be any different from an in-person election should listen to the voters who are far more grounded in reality.
“I’m scared that it might get lost in the mail,” potential voter Kim Tucker said. “I just want to make sure that my vote is submitted, like, I see that it’s submitted, that it actually counts.”
The November election is shaping up to be the mother of all clusterfarks. At every level — federal, state, and local — election officials are sounding the alarm. The system was not built to handle 120 million mailed ballots. Processing and protecting those ballots is beyond the abilities of almost every state.
The concern is not only over the integrity of the ballot. The avalanche of legal challenges to the results will almost certainly run for years and may even delay state and local legislatures from sitting.
Democrats will bring all of this on themselves. It’s a shame that the rest of us are going to suffer for their stupidity.
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