Safe and Secure?
The Vulnerability in Idaho Elections
The common message from party and government leaders in Idaho is that our elections are ‘safe and secure’. We heard it from former IDGOP Chair Tom Luna. We hear it from Governor Little. We are repeatedly told by major media that 2020 was the most secure election in history.
Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but our elections are vulnerable. The vulnerability is a direct function of the number of people that vote absentee. Why?
The ‘ballot chain of custody’ on absentee voting does not compare to that of in-person voting and opens up our elections to significant fraud.
When you vote in-person, you fill out your ballot and drop it into the tabulator or ballot box. Multiple poll workers oversee that process and ensure that nobody is feeding in extra ballots. Ballot inventories at the precinct are checked against the registration list and reconciled to ensure the number of leftover ballots matches the initial inventory minus the number of people who voted plus any spoiled ballots.
If you are suspicious that poll workers may be part of a cheat, then you can sign up to be a poll watcher with your county party or with any candidate. Poll watchers (and poll challengers) also provide oversight that nothing untoward happens at a precinct.
Both poll workers and poll watchers can verify that in-person ballots are sealed and transported to the county, and observation at the county can verify that any further tabulation and ballot handling are done properly. Finally, random hand counts by the Secretary of State, which utilize citizen volunteers, provide an additional check that at selected precincts, the hand count of the physical ballots matches the official tabulation that the county reported to the Secretary of State.
In summary, the ‘chain of custody’ of ballots submitted in-person and transported to the county is very good. The same is not true of absentee ballots.
The route an absentee ballot takes is not open to observation the way in-person ballots are. Even if we assume the absentee requests are legitimate and that the person who requested the absentee ballot is the one who filled it out, we do not have poll workers and poll watchers observing the process.
Absentee ballots returned by mail are routed through Spokane (for north Idaho) or Salt Lake City (for south Idaho). We have no visibility into the handling of those ballots until they are sorted and sent back to the post office where election workers typically retrieve them. Chain of custody from that point is good but it doesn’t matter. Anywhere the chain of custody is not visible opens the process up to nefarious actors intercepting those ballots. It not only can happen, it has happened:
The Heritage Foundation found four court cases1 where elections were overturned because of wide scale absentee voting fraud. Witnesses in those cases testified that it was not anomalous. It had been going on for some time.
A whistleblower in New Jersey2 who claimed he has been a part of absentee voting fraud efforts in dozens of elections shared his story in August of 2020.
Last fall, two Democrats running for office3 finally spoke out about ballot harvesting efforts that have been going on in their communities for years.
The movie ‘2000 Mules’4 showed video and other evidence of ballot harvesting where individuals were dumping dozens of ballots at a time into drop boxes. In some of those areas, ballot harvesting is illegal (it currently is not in Idaho).
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spoke recently of the thwarted attempt in Texas during the 2020 election to influence the election outcome with mail-in ballots. 5
In conclusion, while no hard evidence of election fraud has been found in Idaho, absentee voting has been used to manipulate elections elsewhere. We really don’t know that it hasn’t happened here in Idaho, but the vulnerability does exist.
Recommendations:
Citizens should be informed on any voting guides and on absentee ballot applications that voting absentee is not as secure as voting in-person and they should be encouraged to vote in-person.
Third parties (candidates, political parties, get-out-the-vote groups) should be prohibited from sending applications for absentee ballots to the public.
Citizens who vote absentee should be required to check off a box on the absentee application indicating that they are not able to vote in person.
Absentee voting must be preserved as there are legitimate situations (overseas military, medical restrictions, etc…) that otherwise prevent citizens from exercising their right to vote. But the more people that vote absentee, the larger the potential for election fraud. It should therefore be limited to only those who cannot vote in-person.
https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/four-stolen-elections-the-vulnerabilities-absentee-and-mail-ballots
https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-voter-fraud-with-mail-in-ballots/
https://accfei.org/events/florida-02/ (starts around 4hr 14min mark)
https://2000mules.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eTG32YC_Uw
I’m going to disagree about the safety of in-person voting in Idaho. I was a poll watcher last year and I know the electronic machines were connected to the internet (I asked) which becomes vulnerable to hacking or other software manipulation. I listened for 8 hours as an outside source regularly caused the machines to run slow indicating to me that they might have been tampered with. For the poll workers, this was a normal occurrence. Move on, nothing happening here. Let’s go back to pen and paper, folks.
One additional Point I would like to make is that even Local Postal workers have the ability to loose your ballot either accidentally or intentionally. We have Political signs stolen regularly. Postal Workers Unions Never support Republicans suggesting that they are Partisan. They have access to who is Republican on their Routes.