A US Postal Service audit of the 2024 primaries found ballots to voters were processed on time only an average of 97.01 percent, while voters' ballots returned to election counting centers were processed about 98.17% of the time.
I understand that anyone who even questions the integrity of vote-by-mail is assigned to America's lowest political and social cast.
But I thought you should be aware that a new audit by the Postmaster General of the 2024 primaries found issues, and some mailed ballots might be delayed or not counted in the November election because workers aren’t following required procedures.
Be informed, not misled.
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USPS audit by the Postal Service Inspector General in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
“We found that Postal Service personnel did not always comply with policy and procedures regarding all clear certifications, Election and Political Mail logs, and audit checklists,” the Postal Service Inspector General warned in a report made public this week. “In addition, we identified processes and policies that could pose a risk of delays in the processing and delivery of Election and Political Mail."
“Further, we identified issues related to some Delivering for America operational changes that pose a risk of individual ballots not being counted,” the report says.
The chief internal watchdog made ten recommendations for the Postal Service to improve performance and make sure it doesn’t fail to deliver for the fall presidential election but warned that USPS managers disagreed with two of the solutions.
It noted that while the mail service is committed to timely delivery, not all of the employees it audited at 15 mail processing facilities and 35 delivery units were following the rules and procedures. “We found 12 of 15 (80 percent) mail processing facilities did not complete all clear certifications according to policy” that ensures political mail got processed by daily required deadlines, the report said.
As a result, the audit found overall, ballots to voters were processed on time only on an average of 97.01 percent of the time, while ballots returned to election counting centers were processed about 98.17% of the time, the IG reported.
The National Conference of State Legislatures says that eight states (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington and the District of Columbia) allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail; two states (Nebraska and North Dakota) permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail; nine states, (Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming) allow specific small elections to be conducted by mail; and four states, (Idaho, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Mexico) permit mostly-mail elections for certain small jurisdictions.
That means that two to three percent of ballots gone missing in the mail could add up to tens of thousands or more votes uncounted nationwide in the November election. Other election and political mailings weren’t processed on time about 2.5 percent of the time, according to a chart inside the report.
One of several things that caught my attention was that among the issues flagged in the report were that "postal employees didn’t keep required logs of processing ballots and election mail" and that there was “a lack of management oversight and monitoring to ensure that Election Mail and Political Mail audit checklists were properly completed with accurate information.”
Heritage Foundation: "We Shouldn’t Be Promoting Voting By Mail"
Hans A. von Spakovsky is the Election Law Reform Initiative Manager and Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, and immigration.
In December of 2022, following the last mid-term election, he wrote an article claiming, "We Shouldn’t Be Promoting Voting By Mail."
He says, "Ask yourself: If you won $500 million in the Powerball lottery, would you put your winning ticket into an envelope and trust the U.S. Postal Service to deliver it to the state agency that administers the lottery? Or would you want to deliver your ticket personally to lottery officials to ensure that they received it and acknowledge that you are the owner of that ticket?"
The answer is pretty obvious to just about anyone. So why would we want to encourage voters to cast their ballots through the mail or place them in unsupervised, unsecured “drop” boxes instead of voting in person in a polling place?
A polling place under the bipartisan supervision of election officials and the observation of poll watchers has numerous advantages. It helps ensure not only that the ballots are completed by the registered voters and deposited in a locked, sealed ballot box, but also that the voters’ eligibility and identity are verified; that no voters are pressured or coerced to vote a particular way by candidates, party activists, and political guns-for-hire, who are all prohibited from being inside the polling place; and that no ballots get “lost” in the mail or not delivered on time.
To the average person, a ballot may not be as valuable as a $500 million lottery ticket, but securing our ballots so that every eligible citizen can vote in a secure, fair, and honest election is worth quite a bit. In fact, it is essential to maintaining our democratic republic.
Mail-in or absentee ballots are the ones most susceptible to being stolen, altered, and forged, and the voters are pressured or coerced when voting because they are the only type of ballots marked in an unsupervised, unobserved setting. The many cases of proven absentee ballot fraud in the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database demonstrate and underscore the reason why Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement concluded in a 1998 report that the “lack of ‘in-person, at-the-polls’ accountability make absentee ballots the ‘tool of choice’ for those inclined to commit voter fraud.”
Spakovsky says, "This problem is made worse in the many states like California that allow vote trafficking, which proponents of mail-in voting call 'vote harvesting' because that sounds better. Every state allows absentee ballots to be mailed back or delivered personally to election officials by the voters or, usually, members of their immediate family or a designated caregiver."
"But vote-trafficking states," he explains, "allow any third-party stranger to go to voters’ homes to pick up and deliver their ballot. In other words, these states give political actors with a stake in the outcome of the election the ability to handle a very valuable commodity—the ballots that can ensure the victory (or defeat) of their election or the election of the candidates who they work for and support, giving them the opportunity to complete, alter, or simply fail to deliver those ballots."
Even when fraud doesn't occur, it's still a bad idea.
He says, "But even when fraud doesn’t occur, mail-in voting is still a bad idea for several reasons. The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Postal Service released a report in 2019 on its delivery of election-related mail—including mail-in ballots—in the 2018 election. Its goal was timely delivery of absentee/mail-in ballots 96 percent of the time—not 100 percent. That means that even if the Postal Service met its goal, 4 percent of all voters would potentially not have their mailed ballots delivered on time to be counted. The report said that on average nationally, the service achieved its goal 95.6 percent of the time."
They now claim to be achieving their service goals at 97 to 98% of the time.
However, the worst mail-processing facilities in the country, in places like California, Illinois, and New Jersey, only manage to deliver this very important election mail 84.2 percent of the time.
Imagine the screaming headlines if a jurisdiction rejected 16 percent of all ballots cast by voters in person in a particular polling place or region. Everyone would rightfully be upset.
Even the Leftist New York Times published a critical report in the past that concluded that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised, and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.” What’s changed? Nothing.
Takeaway.
Spakovsky says, "Given the inherent security problems with mail-in ballots, their use should be very limited, and states should protect the integrity of the absentee-voting process by ensuring accurate voter-registration rolls, requiring voter identification, banning permanent absentee-ballots lists that risk ballots being mailed by election officials to voters who have died or moved out of state, and prohibiting vote trafficking."
A poll by the Trafalgar Group in 2022 shows that the longer it takes for election officials to report election results, the less likely the public is to trust the results.
That is just another reason for minimizing mail-in balloting and making it more secure.
In light of this, should we bother with voting?
Absolutely.
Our vote is a sacred right that God has given us in America. We must vote, but we must also be informed and work toward eliminating fraud from our voting process.
That is just another reason for minimizing mail-in balloting and making it more secure.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. VOTE. Pray.