The Patriot Post® · A Mail-In Voting Test Case

For anyone still skeptical about the inherent problems with mail-in voting, we present to you this test case right out of the headlines. A Democrat primary election in New York’s 12th Congressional District that took place on June 23 remains in flux thanks to major fumbles regarding mail-in votes.

Representative Carolyn Maloney, who has served in Congress since 1993, declared victory in the four-way primary after beating out second-place finisher Suraj Patel by 648 votes out of more than 39,000 votes counted. A squeaker to be sure, but that was before counting began on an additional 65,000 mail-in ballots, over a quarter of which were rejected for not having a postmark, thereby putting into question whether or not they were mailed on time.

Ordinarily, New York requires a stamped and post-marked envelope to consider an absentee/mail-in ballot to be preliminarily eligible to be counted. Other factors must also apply, like properly filling out the form and signing it, but vote counters won’t even open the envelope unless it’s postmarked.

That was before the 2020 COVID election. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who along with the rest of the Democrat Party has pushed for a mail-in election this year, signed an order in May that June election voters be provided with a postage-paid envelope. However, the U.S. Postal Service does not postmark prepaid envelopes.

Patel, who refuses to concede to Maloney, has filed a lawsuit to have these ballots in question counted, and a federal judge has issued an order to do just that.

But wait, there’s more. In the nearby NY-15 Congressional District, a 15-candidate Democrat primary to fill the seat of retiring Congressman Jose Serrano resulted in further ballot rejections. In all, 84,000 mail-in ballots in this year’s New York primary election were discounted, representing 21% of the total.

Why did this happen? The USPS does not have the capacity to handle this large volume of mail in such a short time frame. New York and many other states, particularly this year, are allowing for same-day voter registration and same-day absentee ballot voting, a situation for which the post office is not ready now, nor will it be ready for it by November 3.

In the case of the recent New York primary, city Board of Elections personnel were likewise swamped with many more ballots than they could handle. The Manhattan borough office alone received upwards of 40,000 requests for applications 11 days before the election, and it is generally capable of processing about 5,000 per day.

New York is far from an anomaly. Mail-in voting catastrophes are happening everywhere. In Virginia, 500,000 absentee ballot applications were sent to incorrect addresses, another 200,000 in Nevada, and still another 102,000 in California. Of course, you won’t hear about this from the media, because the leftist narrative maintains that mail-in ballots are the way to go. Under the guise of maintaining social distancing on Election Day, they are pushing for a nationwide mail-in election in November.

We have maintained repeatedly that mail-in elections are ripe for problems, including voter fraud, and there are scores, if not hundreds, of cases of municipal and state-level elections taking place around the country that prove this to be true.

The instances reported above in New York are due merely to government incompetence and poor planning. Imagine what happens when crooked election workers get involved. And don’t forget that a vast majority of big cities’ boards of election, like most government agencies, are controlled by Democrats. If the mail-in voter trend is allowed to continue, and if it is the primary means of voting on November 3, then it is likely, however unfortunate, that our voting problems are just getting started.