A primary election for a House seat in a safe Democrat district in Florida underscores why mail-in voting is highly problematic due to its inherent unreliability that severely undercuts voters’ trust in an election outcome. In Florida’s 20th district, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick won the Democrat primary over her opponent after a recount. The election was decided by a total of five votes after almost 1,400 mail-in votes were thrown out due to a variety of factors.

Those factors included missing the Election Day deadline, unsigned ballots, mismatched signatures, and ballots sent in from the wrong district or from the wrong party, as Florida has closed primaries. “The result is an ambiguous hash,” observes the Wall Street Journal editorial board. “In an election decided by five votes, who knows what another 1,400 might have done? The second-place candidate at one point said he was considering his legal options, and he probably regrets not urging his supporters to vote in person.”

But these are the types of problems that plague mail-in votes everywhere. For example, in the 2020 presidential election, Florida threw out 13,919 mail-in votes, Michigan rejected 20,480, and Pennsylvania nixed 34,171. And the plethora of reasons for these mail-in votes being rejected could have been avoided entirely if voters had simply shown up to their polling stations on Election Day and cast a vote in person.

Meanwhile, Democrat lawmakers are attempting to massively expand no-excuse mail-in voting by mandating its inclusion in every state via their HR1/SB1 election “reform” bills. And they ridiculously assert that Republican opposition to such action and counter efforts to secure election integrity legislatively are a “threat to democracy.” In reality, the threat to America’s electoral process is a massive unaccountable mail-in voting gambit that only multiplies the difficulty of certifying the veracity of votes, opens the door wide for fraud, and introduces a myriad of otherwise avoidable complications that could unintentionally lead to the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters.

Again, voters could avoid these issues entirely by showing up and voting in person on Election Day, or even on the numerous early voting days available.

Not long ago, the realization that unlimited mail-in voting posed a threat to the integrity of America’s electoral process was a bipartisan view. Jimmy Carter chaired the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, which warned, “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”

Furthermore, as Doug Andrews has previously observed: “No country worth its salt does mail-in voting. France — France — banned it in 1975 because the French knew it meant rampant fraud.” In fact, 85% of European Union countries bar mail-in ballots or require a photo ID for those ballots. These nations also recognize that mail-in balloting is one of the primary vectors for voting fraud, hence the reason for such strict limits.

Democrats insisting on expanding mail-in voting are calling for more election fraud, not less. And they know it.