With four months until the 2020 general election, warning bells are ringing about the integrity of expanded mail-in voting.
Four Democratic politicians were arrested and accused of election fraud in May for allegedly tampering with “hundreds” of votes in a local municipal election.
In Texas, a post office employee was seen on surveillance video throwing away campaign fliers from a Republican candidate.
This isn’t a new issue. Since 2012, researchers have found at least 28 million mail-in ballots have been lost.
And in New Jersey, a lawsuit has been filed after voter rights groups say tens of thousands of votes were “arbitrarily” thrown away in May — which means almost 10 percent of all mail-in votes in the state weren’t counted.
According to The New Jersey Spotlight, “election officials did not count 9.6% of ballots sent in. A database provided by the state Division of Elections shows more than a dozen reasons for rejecting ballots.”
Ballots were rejected because signatures on the mail-in vote didn’t match the one officials had on file. Voting rights advocates say this could disproportionately impact senior voters in the upcoming election.
>“When you think about how much a signature can change over the years, or how a disability can impact one’s handwriting, it is clear that this is unacceptable,” Ryan Haygood, president of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, said in May.
Senior voters are a reliable voting block for the Republican Party and President Donald Trump — and with the 2020 presidential election coming up in just four short months, a close election could become a fraudulent landslide if ten percent of senior votes are discarded nationwide.
Voting rights advocates say the situation is unacceptable and have sued the state for a solution.
“The high number of rejected ballots in the May municipal elections because of signature issues underscores how vital it is that we provide an opportunity for voters to cure their ballots in time for the primary election,” Jesse Burns, executive director of the League of Women Voters of New Jersey, told New Jersey Spotlight.
It’s an issue CNN and the mainstream media has repeatedly dismissed as a Trump campaign conspiracy theory.
But the fact remain — mail-in voting is dangerous.
And more needs to be done to guarantee the integrity of mail-in votes before the 2020 general election.
Report: 28 million mail-in ballots lost since 2012
The Horn editorial team