Because, as EA keeps explaining, Democrats cheat.
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin this week sent a letter to state elections commissioners begging them to immediately rescind the rule that bars absentee voters from requesting a new ballot if their preferred candidate drops out. Awww. Did Democrats get hoisted by their own petard again? Wonderful! I love it.
Three weeks ago, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley dropped out of the Democratic primary for Wisconsin Governor and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez. She dropped out last week after her campaign imploded. So Wisconsin Democrats begged Crowley to get back into the race because he may be their only hope to derail Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong, who is leading in the polls because there are a lot of dumb people in Wisconsin. Not enough, however, for Hong to win in the general election.
But there is a problem, you see. By law, early voting in Wisconsin cannot begin more than 14 days prior to the election, which means early voting begins on Tuesday, July 28, for the August 11 primary. But thousands of voters have already requested and returned absentee ballots, and many presumably included votes for Sara Rodriguez or David Crowley before they dropped out of the race. Once again, as they did with Graham Platner and before that with Joe Biden, Democrats are engaged in an effort to replace a candidate their voters had supported in the usual nominating process when the party becomes convinced that candidate will lose.
Democrats and progressive love early voting. More mail-in ballots, more chain of custody problems, more opportunities to harvest votes and engage in untraceable voter fraud. They also prefer early voting because it favors knee-jerk, low-information voters who vote along party lines down the ballot without knowing anything else about who they are voting for.If late developing news, debate disasters and scandals engulf Democratic candidates, the votes are already in. Universal early voting is bad for democracy, civic responsibility and election integrity, which is why the practice should only be permitted under special circumstances, but never mind: the Left argues that it increases voter access when it really increases opportunities to cheat.
Hong, in 2020, said she supported “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.” After a police-involved shooting this week when a perp with a knife resisted arrest and was shot (black perp, naturally, because there are protests), Hong reiterated that bonkers position.
Ethics Alarms 
i have concluded that Wisconsin/ Minnesota are to be deleted from my travel ititineraries in the future
Here is my solution to securing absentee/early ballots. Make secret ballots only available in person.
The combination of absentee and secret ballots isn’t securable, and the benefits of a secret ballot are largely eliminated by allowing them to fill them out in an insecure location, just make them open. People voting this way have already opened the doors to buying and selling votes.
I don’t support early voting at all, but you could give them a
I’d like to respond to your repeated claims about mail in voting
If mailin fraud were this easy and untraceable, we’d see it everywhere by now, but states have been voting by mail for decades and the fraud isn’t there. The rare cases that do happen get caught, because these ballots are tracked and verified at every step. That’s the opposite of untraceable. “More opportunities for fraud” seems like a logical way to think but because every time it’s been tested with audits and court cases, it’s come up empty. You can’t keep pointing at what might happen when we have decades of evidence showing what actually does.
Ben
Ben: You forgot to mark this as “sarc” . Without it some might believe that mail-in ballots were closely monitored and tracked, and not just blindly mailed to every name on the voter rolls (living or dead). You have mail-in ballots confused with “absentee ballots” which are sent out only when someone personally requests them and meets the standard for voting absentee.
Simple question: with mail-in voting, how do you know who filled out the ballot? You DON’T. Simple as that. If a system has an obvious hole in its security, it will be exploited, and whether it is or it isn’t, or it can be tracked when it is or not, such holes are wrong and unacceptable. That ends the debate. And those who insist of keeping an obvious hole in security are likely to be the ones who see a benefit to it.
Signature verification is how they know. The ballot signature gets matched against your registration and mismatches get flagged and investigated. It’s the same standard used for absentee ballots the military has used for a century. And think about your standard…. no system survives “any theoretical hole is unacceptable”
In person voting has holes too, impersonation, registration errors, machine issues. Your “theoretical vulnerability” means all voting is unacceptable. Real security isn’t “zero theoretical holes” but detection and enforcement. Plus, we have decades of results that say the system works. And your comment that people who defend it must benefit from fraud… that can cut both ways. I could just as easily say people who want to make voting harder benefit from fewer people voting. Theoretical motives isn’t an argument and it’s the only leg you have to stand on when the evidence isn’t going your way.
Signature verification is how they know. The ballot signature gets matched against your registration and mismatches get flagged and investigated.
No. That only proves who signed it (if it is done effectively and consistently, which I doubt). That does not prove who voted, who filled in the bubbles. Come on. You know that.
If you want the whole list…
1. Unlike in-person voting, election workers cannot directly verify a voter’s identity or eligibility at the moment the ballot is cast.
2. Mail-in ballots travel through the postal system or sit in drop boxes, exposing them to potential theft, loss, or delivery delays.
3. Ballots mailed early must be securely stored in warehouses or election offices for weeks, creating prolonged physical security demands.
4. “Ballot harvesting,” or allowing third parties to collect and submit ballots, increases the risk of organized tampering or unlawful coordination.
5. Voting outside a private booth means a family member, campaign operative, employer or caretaker can pressure a voter or observe their choices.
6. Voting weeks early means individuals may cast their ballots before critical, late-breaking campaign developments or debates occur.
7. Processing and verifying inbound mail ballots—such as matching signatures and opening envelopes—takes considerably longer than machine-scanning in-person votes, making the election process less trustworthy.
Conclusion: the fewer mail-in ballots the better.
“That only proves who signed it… That does not prove who voted, who filled in the bubbles.”
No system on earth verifies who marked the ballot including in person . In person voting checks who showed up but nobody watches you fill in the bubbles in the booth either! Every voting system authenticates the person, not the bubbles. You’re demanding a standard your own preferred system doesn’t even do.
“Election workers cannot directly verify a voter’s identity or eligibility at the moment the ballot is cast.”
Verification happens at a different step: signature matching against registration, in nearly every state. And the outcomes say it works…only four fraud cases per 10 million mail votes across the 2016 to 2022 elections, per Brookings.
“Mail-in ballots travel through the postal system or sit in drop boxes, exposing them to potential theft, loss, or delivery delays.”
Every ballot carries a unique barcode….I can track mine online, if it’s stolen or lost it gets voided and replaced and the barcode blocks any duplicate. Stealing a ballot is a felony with a paper trail.
“Ballots mailed early must be securely stored… creating prolonged physical security demands.”
Requiring security isn’t the same as being insecure. Show me the cases of stored ballots being tampered with. Oregon’s run this longest with 38 convictions out of about 61 million ballots over 19 years.
”‘Ballot harvesting’… increases the risk of organized tampering or unlawful coordination.”
Which is why it’s regulated and most states restrict collection to family or caregivers, cap counts, and make violations a felony. Your best example from 2018, was illegal it was caught, and the election was voided. That’s enforcement working, not a blind spot.
“A family member, campaign operative, employer or caretaker can pressure a voter or observe their choices.”
Your best point But it shows up within that near zero rate of never happening…coerced voters can request a replacement that voids the first ballot, and every all mail state still offers in person voting. The military’s voted absentee on this model since the Civil War.
“Individuals may cast their ballots before critical, late-breaking campaign developments or debates occur.”
That’s not a security flaw and it’s my choice of when I’ve heard enough. Then that logic bans early in person voting which most states offer and both parties use. But irrelevant
“Processing and verifying inbound mail ballots… takes considerably longer… making the election process less trustworthy.”
Slow isn’t inaccurate. The slow part is the verification you demanded in point one earlier and you’re counting the same safeguard as a flaw twice. States that allow preprocessing report fast…that’s a policy fix, not a mail problem.
“Conclusion: the fewer mail-in ballots the better.”
That only follows if you weigh both sides, and you listed only one. Measured cost is about four cases per 10 million votes. Benefit is millions of elderly, disabled, rural, and military voters who otherwise can’t vote. So you offered 7 hypotheticals with a near-zero realized rate don’t outweigh that.
“No system on earth verifies who marked the ballot including in person . In person voting checks who showed up but nobody watches you fill in the bubbles in the booth either!”
That’s so lame it relieves me of reading the other rationalizations. Who fills in the bubbles in the voting booth other than the voter sitting there, ghosts? Have you ever voted? The “booths” have three sides, but the voter is visible the whole time.
I have to counter this nonsense: “Measured cost is about four cases per 10 million votes.” Voter fraud is almost impossible to catch. You just repeated a pro-voter fraud talking point. If a family member checks the box of old, senile mom’s ballot, how would anyone prove that? You can’t, of course. If a ballot harvester collects absentee ballots from a rest home and fills in the bubbles, how would that be demonstrated? It can’t be.
This analysis prompts me to talk about standard Process Safety Management procedures at use in industrial settings, especially at refineries, like where I work.
An element of PSM is the Process Hazard Analysis, which examines all the details of a process unit and asks, “What if this fails?” What if this valve fails open? What if this level stops reading properly? What if this safeguard is disabled? What are the consequences of these failures? There’s a joke that PHA’s analyze all the way to meteor strikes, but the general concept is stop and consider how badly things could go if a number of problems line up simultaneously. Once those have been identified, we ask, “Do we have enough safeguards in place?” The point of the exercise is to identify hazards before they actually happen, so that we aren’t mopping up after an explosion kills people and costs the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
The analysis of safeguards first risk-ranks the problem. What is the likelihood of a failure happening, and how severe is that failure? Once the issue is risk ranked, if the risk is deemed high enough, then new safeguards are required to bring the risk, not to 0, but to as low as reasonably possible (ALARP, if you like acryonyms). Safeguards themselves must meet certain requirements, such as being sufficiently independent of each other so that a common failure doesn’t disable multiple safeguards all at once.
For example, if you take credit for an alarm coupled with an operator action to safeguard a process, you cannot take credit for another alarm coupled with an operator action as an additional safeguard. The common element of the operator means if the operator is unable to notice the alarms (such as being in an alarm flood from multiple issues on the process), both safeguards are failing simultaneously.
When we look at mail-in voting, I think the same process would be helpful, especially if we can really put meaningful risk-ranking to fraudulent activities.
The biggest risk with mail-in voting is someone using someone else’s ballot. The safeguards commonly cited to mitigate that problem are signature validation, ballot tracking, secure drop boxes, maintaining voter rolls, bipartisan administration, and criminal penalties.
If we start with criminal penalties, the first question we need to ask is how effective criminal penalties are. For a great many people, knowing something is illegal is sufficient for them to not do it. But there will still be people who will violate the law, especially if they have incentive, and the effectiveness of criminal penalties as deterrents is dependent on two factors: the extent of the punishment, and the likelihood of the punishment. If punishment is unlikely, then criminal penalties will not be an effective measure against fraud. So really, criminal penalties come down to whether or not fraud can be readily detected. If the answer is in the negative, then I would put criminal penalties at an integrity level of 1 — maybe a risk reduction of 90%.
If we then look a the whole chain of custody, we have mail-in ballots produced, mailed off to registered voters, filled out by someone, returned somehow, validated by someone, and recorded. I’m not going to game out every single step here, but it is worthwhile to ask where the system is the most vulnerable. Voter rolls are probably one of the most vulnerable points, because they are already a challenge to maintain. But it becomes all the more of an issue when policies or laws make it hard to clean up the rolls, and potentially allow people onto the rolls without proper vetting. An additional vulnerability lies in the fact the mail-in ballot is separated from the identifying envelope in order to maintain secrecy on how an individual voted, an so can’t be tied back to the voter during an audit.
So here’s a scenario. There’s a precinct with voter rolls that have not be cleaned up for a long time. A bunch of mail-in ballots are produced for the precinct, but some do not actually get mailed out. They are filled out at the precinct with the intent to mix them into rest of the ballots. Barcodes are scanned to make it seem like the ballots went out and were returned. Then the ballots are “separated” from their envelopes, tallied, and go into the general mix of ballots. Now, as long as the total mail-in ballots returned is less than or equal to the number that went out, it looks clean. An audit of who received mail-in ballots might show that the ballot went out to, say, a dead person, and it is a problem that the dead person is recorded as voting, but how did he vote? No audit is going to catch that, so how would you go about deducting a vote from the total? Do you take it from candidate A or candidate B? And who gets prosecuted? A situation like this needs to have safeguards in place (like multiple people verifying ballots that come in, the people who have access to the raw ballots are not the people who verify the completed ballots), because otherwise fraud could occur undetected.