Democrats are determined to use one of these gargantuan and utterly unconstitutional bailout bills to mandate nationwide vote by mail. And they want the ballots to be mailed out automatically to everyone whose name is listed in the voter registry, whether they request one or not and whether they are dead or alive. This, of course, will be big boon to the Chicago machine, which routinely has dead people voting in city elections.

There is so much potential for mischief here that this process could more accurately be described as “cheat-by-mail.” The U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Election Administration and Voting Surveys reveals that 16.4 million ballots mailed to registered voters went missing between the 2016 and 2018 elections. All told since 2012 a staggering total of 28.4 million ballots have gone missing. That’s 28.4 million opportunities to cheat.

In 2016, Democrats likely seized control of California’s Orange County – a longtime reliably Republican bastion – through ballot harvesting, based on the difference between election day totals and final totals, which showed a huge, anomalous surge in votes to Democrat candidates.

Ballot harvesting wasn’t legalized in California until the 2018 mid-term elections. California’s law allows anyone to drop off someone else’s mail-in ballot at a polling station. There is no process for vetting or verifying those who deliver the ballots. Democrats dropped hundreds of thousands of ballots off at polling places and flipped seven Republican seats in the process. Orange County, home of Ronald Reagan and once a bastion of conservatism, has been turned from red to blue virtually overnight.

The Government Accountability Institute warns that if Democrats are successful, a grand total of 24 million ballots will be delivered this year to ineligible voters. These ballots could go to an untold number of dead people, wrong addresses, or voters who are double-registered.

Voter ID will be a thing of the past, as ballots will be submitted by millions and millions of voters who have never had to actually verify their identity to anybody. Mississippi, where I used to live, went to required voter ID several years ago, where voters had to present photo ID to get a ballot. There were all the predictable howls of outrage about voter disenfranchisement suppression and, just as predictably, zero complications when it was actually implemented seamlessly.

In-person voting has been a staple of American electoral politics since day one. And for good reason. Everyone who wants to cast a vote needs to have enough vested in electoral politics to demonstrate his investment by physically showing up at a polling place and being satisfactorily vetted as an eligible voter.

Of course we should always make the option of absentee voting available, but it should be strictly reserved for those who have a valid reason to be out of town on election day – illness, travel, military service, or the like.

Democrats are seizing on the manufactured hysteria of the coronavirus contagion (in-person voting is a threat to public health, don’t you know) to push for massive, dangerous, and anti-democratic changes to the way we vote. They are intent, as always, on not letting a good crisis go to waste.

The completely unnecessary incarceration-in-place fatwas have given them their latest fig leaf to give people an excuse to vote without leaving their homes. In Nevada, for instance, its secretary of state plans to impose universal mail-in voting for the state’s June 9 primary election. (In my new home state of Washington, voting by mail is the only option available. Even if you wanted to show up and cast your ballot in person, there’s no place to do it.)

Nevada Democrats are demanding that the Secretary of State send ballots not just to active registrations but to “every name in the voter registry.” They also want to eliminate rules that invalidate ballots because of mismatched signatures – “Elmer Fudd” would literally be eligible to vote. They also want to ensure that ballot harvesting is enabled, so Democrat operatives can sweep through every nursing home in the state, get the patients to sign a blank ballot, and offer to fill it out for them and turn it in – as a public service of course.

So the Nevada Secretary of State intends to mail an absentee ballot to every registered voter. They don’t even need to ask for one. All this does is ensure that an increasing number of completely uninformed voters will determine who Nevada’s officeholders will be. She gleefully declared that “no action or steps, such as submitting an absentee ballot request application will be required.” She attributed the decision to “the many uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Elizabeth Warren is demanding that all jurisdictions be prohibited from actually cleaning their voter rolls, and is also demanding that individuals be allowed to vote with nothing more than a “sworn statement of identity instead of a voter ID.”

Universal ballot mailout to everybody in the registry, weaking security provisions, and promoting unlimited ballot harvesting by special interest groups is not an expression of sound political science but rather a virtual guarantee of intentional election chaos. If the right to vote is “sacred,” as Nancy Pelosi insists, this is blasphemy.

One of the monstrous things about these proposed sweeping changes is that they are not being done by the Legislature and the elected representatives of the people but by politically motivated and compromised bureaucrats. If Democrats succeed in Nevada, it would set a horrible precedent for others to follow all over the country.

Politico reported that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is already gearing up to air digital ads in battleground states on how to cheat vote by mail.

Wisconsin pulled off an upset in a state Supreme Court race through an aggressive vote-by-mail campaign. Republicans, who believe in playing by the rules, are not ready to engage in warfare in an absentee-ballot campaign.

And actual voter fraud using mail-in ballots has been proved repeatedly to exist. The Heritage Foundation has a record of at least 20 voter fraud cases resulting in overturned election results between 1992 and 2018.

This includes the outcome of the 2018 race in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. About 61% of all mailed votes were cast for the Republican candidate even though only 16% of those who requested a ballot belonged to the GOP. (Ballot fraud is so tempting that some Republicans do it, too.) The North Carolina Board of Elections decertified the entire election and ordered a do-over.

In 2016, Missouri state Rep. Penny Hubbard won the Democrat primary for a state house seat by just 90 votes. The absentee vote tally was so lopsided in her favor a judge ordered a new election. Her opponent won by 1,533 votes.

In New York in 2014, state assembly candidate Hector Ramirez deceived voters into giving their absentee ballots to his campaign, which then inserted his name on at least 35 absentee ballots. Ramirez was initially declared the winner, but a recount without the fraudulent absentee ballots determined that he lost by two votes.

In Noxubee County, Mississippi, Democrat officials paid notaries to steal ballots from mailboxes and vote the ballots in place of the intended voters.

In Eatonville, Florida, Anthony Grant lost the in-person vote for mayor in 2015 but won the election with twice the number of absentee ballots his opponent got. He was convicted for felony voter fraud.

In 1998, a judge threw out the results of the Miami mayoral race because of a massive fraud case that involved more than 5,000 absentee ballots. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded, “The absentee ballot is the ‘tool of choice’ for those who are engaging in election fraud.”

When J. Christian Adams worked in the civil rights division of the Justice Department, his investigative work led to judges overturning the results of several Mississippi races and others in Texas. Said Adams, “With ballot harvesting, the politically connected visit the homes of people and vote the ballots for them...Vote harvesters, in some cases, don’t have jobs and make more doing this than anything else.”

Adams, now the president of the Public Legal Interest Foundation, said, “Vote by mail is a disaster. People who think it works haven’t studied the failures. The facts show mail voting doesn’t work.”

Bottom line: in-person voting today, in-person voting tomorrow, in-person voting forever.

The author may be contacted at bfischer@afa.net

Follow me on Facebook at “Focal Point” and on Twitter @bryanjfischer

Host of “Focal Point” on American Family Radio, 1:05 pm CT, M-F www.afr.net