Ballot harvesting destroys the secret ballot

Democrats in Congress and in state capitols are pushing for measures that would enable voter intimidation and undermine the secret ballot, under cover of facilitating voting during the CCP Bat Virus pandemic.

Earlier this week, the Daily Signal published a list of 15 election results that were tossed over fraudulent mail-in ballots. The article put a spotlight on the practice of "ballot harvesting" which figured in many of these cases:

"The problem with vote harvesting is that it destroys the secret ballot. It allows people to go into homes, pressure people," von Spakovsky, who also is a former Justice Department lawyer, member of the Federal Election Commission, and member of the 2017 Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity....

While working in the civil rights division of the Justice Department, J. Christian Adams helped bring successful cases against election fraudsters in Starr County, Texas and Noxubee County, Mississippi.

"With ballot harvesting, the politically connected visit the homes of people and vote the ballots for them. These are victims often afraid of consequences," Adams, now president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election integrity group, told The Daily Signal.

In the fallout from the Mississippi case, judges overturned the results of several races.

"You can't overlook the importance of government jobs in the economically dependent areas," Adams said. "Vote harvesters, in some cases, don't have jobs and make more doing this than anything else in some parts of the country."

The Noxubee County, Mississippi, case involved political bosses paying notaries to take absentee ballots from the mail boxes of voters who had requested them, then voting and fraudulently notarizing the ballots.

A 2019 Daily Signal article links to an FBI news release about the 2014 conviction of Martin, Ky., mayor Ruth Thomasine Robinson:

Trial testimony established that the conspirators completed absentee ballots, marking their choice of candidates, and instructing the voters to sign the pre-marked ballots. Voters who complied by voting for Thomasine Robinson received promises of better living arrangements and other considerations. Voters who did not comply faced eviction or the loss of priority for public housing. In addition, the evidence established that the defendants offered to pay several voters to vote for Thomasine Robinson.

2019 Heritage Foundation report on ballot harvesting quotes a Miami-Dade County, Florida, grand jury report:

[O]nce that ballot is out of the hands of the elector, we have no idea what happens to it. The possibilities are numerous and scary....

If the ballot is complete and the return envelope is signed and not sealed, the boleteros/ballot brokers can remove the ballot from the secrecy envelope and see the private, confidential selections the elector made on the ballot. Similarly, if the ballot is not completely voted and the return envelope is signed and not sealed, the boletero/ballot broker can remove the ballot from the secrecy envelope...and then vote the rest of the ballot in lieu of the elector. If the boletero does not like the selections made by the elector, the boleteros can simply throw the ballot away and no one would ever know. All of these possibilities are present if an elector relinquishes, to a boletero, control of a fully or partially marked ballot contained in a signed but unsealed return mailing envelope.

The more unsettling issue for us is each of the above illegal actions can also take place with a boletero picking up a fully or partially marked ballot contained in a signed and sealed return mailing envelope. The boletero can either stealthily or surgically open the envelope, view the choices of the voter and then decide whether the un-voted portions of a partially completed ballot will be filled out by the boleteros or whether, depending on the elector's choices, the ballot will simply be discarded.

It wasn't mentioned in these stories, but I was reminded of an infamous 2010 municipal corruption case in Bell, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. The local cabal remained in power by means of ballot harvesting, which was illegal in California at that time. By holding special elections and by having harvesters visit city employees at home to "assist" them in voting their absentee ballots, corrupt city officials maintained their hold on power.

The city manager and assistant city manager managed to increase their salaries to six figures ($787,637 for the city manager), with city council members making $96,996 a year for a part-time position in a small (population 36,624 in 2000), working-class city with a median annual income of less than $35,000. A special election in which 390 ballots were cast, 239 (more than half) of them absentee, "cleared the way for City Council members to significantly increase their salaries."

Four voters said city officials walked door-to-door encouraging them to fill out absentee ballots. In one case, a woman said she signed papers she believed were election paperwork. She never filed an absentee ballot. But when she went to the polls on election day, records showed that she had voted absentee.

Two other voters said that two council members came to their homes urging them to fill out absentee ballots. The voters did -- and a few weeks later the council members collected the ballots, saying that they would personally submit them, according to the voters. ...

One Bell resident, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said he worked with Camacho in 2009 on the election.

The man said he and others were given lists of absentee voters, which are public records.

"Our objective was to retrieve [absentee ballots], and if they were not filled out, instruct them how to fill it out, and if not, fill it out for them," he said.

The group members were also supplied with blank ballots, he said. "If they didn't have [their absentee ballot], 'By the way, we have some you can fill out.' "

The man, who also has provided his account to a district attorney's investigator, said the group members would knock on doors and when people answered, they would announce, "We're here from the city of Bell. We're picking up ballots. If you haven't , we can help you fill it out." ...

An article on the Global Anticorruption Blog mentioning Bell notes, "In many states, municipal elections are overseen by the very officials running in those elections, providing a strong incentive to tamper with elections in the low cost, hard-to-detect way of falsifying absentee ballots." The article links to stories about federal election fraud convictions in Cudahy, California, and West Memphis, Arkansas.

The Cudahy, California, case from 2012, which resulted in a guilty plea from the former mayor and former acting city manager:

In his plea agreement, Perales, 43, who ran the Code Enforcement Division of the Cudahy Community Services Department, admits being a bag man for city officials who took bribes, including Silva and Conde. The Perales plea agreement also discusses election fraud during the 2007 municipal election when absentee ballot were diverted before reaching the City Clerk. Perales "and other city officials routinely and systematically opened the absentee ballots cast in the 2007 City Council election by mail," according to the statement of facts in Perales' plea agreement. "Ballots cast in favor of the incumbent candidates were resealed and returned to the mail to be counted. Ballots for non-incumbent candidates were discarded." Perales and other city officials did the same thing during the 2009 Cudahy City Council election, according to the court document.

The West Memphis case involved State Representative Hudson Hallum, his father, Kent Hallum, West Memphis City Councilman and County Juvenile Probation Officer Phillip Carter, and West Memphis Police Officer Sam Malone:

According to the felony information, Hudson Hallum and Kent Hallum tasked Carter, Malone, and others with identifying absentee ballot voters within District 54; obtaining and distributing absentee ballot applications to particular voters; determining when absentee ballots were mailed to absentee voters by the Crittenden County Clerk's Office; and making contact with recipients of absentee ballots to assist those voters in completing the ballots. Once such absentee ballots were completed, the absentee voters typically placed their ballots in unsealed envelopes, which were retrieved by Carter, Malone, and others and then subsequently delivered to either Hudson Hallum or Kent Hallum for inspection to ensure that the absentee ballot votes had been cast for Hudson Hallum. After inspection by Hudson Hallum or Kent Hallum, the absentee ballots that contained votes for Hudson Hallum were sealed and mailed to the Crittenden County Clerk's Office. If a ballot contained a vote for Hudson Hallum's opponent, it was destroyed.

Hans von Spakovsky, head of the Election Law Reform Initiative, says, regarding mail-in ballots generally:

Voting by mail is the single worst form of election possible. It moves the entire election beyond the oversight of election officials and into places where the most vulnerable can be exploited by political operatives.

The secret ballot (known as the Australian Ballot for its origins in the pre-commonwealth states of that continent) is a relatively new innovation in political history. It's instructive to review the abuses that led to election practices that we now take for granted. The first chapter of the 1917 University of Chicago dissertation The History of the Australian Ballot in the United States details the use of privately printed ballots, pre-marked and distributed by political operatives, marked in such a distinctive way that poll-watchers could easily tell which voter supported which ticket, and to distribute bribes or punishments accordingly.

No one is proposing to eliminate official printed ballots, but Democrats are pushing to expand absentee balloting beyond rare cases of necessity and to eliminate tight safeguards that ensure the ballot is kept secret from the voter's pen to the ballot box.

The secret ballot is the one place where Americans are free to express their true opinion without social pressure. Naturally, totalitarian leftists, who have succeeded in harnessing social media to shame people into self-censoring dissenting views and to ban and dox the bold few who persist, would like to eliminate this last redoubt of pure freedom. We can't allow it to happen.

MORE: The Public Interest Legal Foundation has compiled data from the Election Assistance Commission and calculates that over 28 million postal ballots went missing over the last four federal election cycles (2012-2018).

Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.

States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots since they were mailed - and the figure of 28 million missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency's survey questions. This figure does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.

A summary of the Public Interest Legal Foundation's findings is here (PDF).

In 2001, the Voting Technology Project, a joint MIT / Cal Tech study conducted in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election that hung by a chad, noted the fraud potential of absentee voting.

Fraud and security are social problems--people will commit fraud if they are willing to win by any means.Error is more of an engineering problem; we should make every effort to make machines, databases, and other aspects of the voting system more reliable. The social nature of security also means there are different solutions available. Penalties for electoral fraud and improved detection methods can act to deter individuals from conducting fraud. Judging by recent court cases, the greatest fraud problems may lie in absentee balloting (though registration also presents some problems), a part of the process that has less oversight than voting in precincts. ...

Indeed, the most prominent recent election fraud court cases involved absentee ballots -- Dodge County, Georgia in 1996 and Miami in 1997. Dodge County involved two competing candidates for the Democratic nomination for the county commission bidding against each other for absentee ballots inside the county courthouse. In Miami, fraud so pervaded the absentee ballots that an appellate court eventually threw out all absentee ballots and declared a winner based solely on the machine vote.

We have no systematic measures of fraud, but fraud appears to be especially difficult to regulate in absentee systems. In-precinct voting or "kiosk" voting is observable. Absentee voting is not. The prospect for coercion is increased with absentee voting on demand.

The report lists several absentee ballot negatives: coercion, fraud, security, accuracy, slowness of ballot processing, and the degradation of the civic and ceremonial aspect of everyone going to the polls on election day. The MIT / Cal Tech team recommended reverting to stronger limits on casting absentee ballots, offering in-person absentee as a more secure way to make voting convenient, and keeping separate election statistics based on method of voting:

First, restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting. The convenience that on-demand absentees produces is bought at a significant cost to the real and perceived integrity of the voting process. On the face of it, early voting can provide nearly equal convenience with significantly greater controls against fraud and coercion. Traditional absentee procedures for cause are still valuable for the limited situations they were originally intended for. States should return to those practices.

Second, establish uniform reporting of absentee and precinct voting results. States should require that election jurisdictions report, in a uniform manner, data necessary to diagnose the accuracy and efficient administration of non-precinct ballots, as well as data necessary to ensure citizens that such procedures are no less accurate, error-prone, or fraud-prone than in-precinct methods. These data include (1) separate election returns by method of casting a ballot (e.g., in-precinct, absentee, early), (2) cost accounts associated with administering different modes of balloting, and (3) statistics concerning the number of challenges to ballots and the reasons for excluding ballots from counting. Clear reporting will allow states to assess the effectiveness of absentee and early voting and to identify potential problems and irregularities.