Among the most controversial aspects of the 2020 presidential election, which resulted in Joe Biden taking the oath of office on January 20 instead of President Donald Trump, was the widespread use of “mail-in ballots.” The opportunity for corresponding widespread voter fraud was demonstrated by a report out of Nevada that more than 90,000 ballots were returned as undeliverable — in just one county.
If in excess of 90,000 ballots were returned, this raises the question of just how many were delivered to residences where someone used the ballots to cast an extra ballot in addition to their own ballot via mail-in ballot? Considering that Biden’s official margin of victory over Trump was a mere 34,000 out of nearly 1.4 million votes cast, this is highly significant.
J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which conducted an analysis of the election data out of Nevada’s Clark County — the state’s largest county — said, “Mass-mail balloting is a step backward for American elections. There are millions of voter registration records with unreliable ‘active’ address information that will ultimately send ballots to the wrong place in a mail election.”
The 2020 election produced an unusually high number of such ballots. Combining the election years of 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 only a total of 5,863 such ballots returned as undeliverable.
Following the controversial 2000 presidential election, in which then-Governor George W. Bush of Texas narrowly defeated then-Vice President Al Gore in the state of Florida — thus winning the Electoral College vote 271-266 — a special commission was created to examine America’s election procedures and make recommendations for improvement. The concern was focused on creating election systems that Americans could trust to produce an accurate and honest outcome.
The bipartisan commission was led by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican. They specifically denounced the use of mail-in ballots as too open to fraudulent results. It should be understood that mail-in voting is different from what is known as absentee voting. Under absentee voting, registered voters request a ballot, and they must provide some sort of proof of identity, such as a drivers’ license. However, with mail-in voting, states simply send ballots, unrequested to registered voters. The problem with this is that voters could have moved or died, which means the ballot is then delivered to whomever are at the present residences.
It is not a concern, per se, that 90,000 ballots were returned as undeliverable, but rather whether there were thousands of ballots delivered to the wrong person or persons, and were then returned as cast ballots. This alone could have swung the state of Nevada from Trump to Biden.
In the United States, we have historically settled our political differences at the ballot box. Even if we do not win a particular election, we realize that we will have another chance to prevail in the next election. But once we lose faith in the election process, it tears the social fabric. If the ballot box is considered rigged, there is a much greater chance that discontented Americans will resort to the cartridge box.
Unfortunately, instead of recognizing the very real possibility that the outcome of the election was changed in Nevada and some other states by fraud, involving methods such as mail-in voting, and that confidence in the electoral system needs to be restored by ensuring it is free and fair, the Democratic Party leadership in Congress has opted to “double down,” and attempt to make the matter both worse and permanent.
An 800-page bill, H.R. 1, now before Congress, would only exacerbate the problem. This bill would eliminate voter ID laws in the states, force the states to allow same-day voter registration, abolish witness signature requirements for mail-in ballots, and even require that mail-in ballots that arrive 10 days after the election be counted. All of this is designed, of course, to make voter fraud that favors the Democratic Party easier to commit.
It is also unconstitutional. Nothing in the federal Constitution allows Congress to enact such a law. The Constitution leaves the details of election laws to the states, not the Congress. Therefore, states need to sue in federal court, and they need to simply refuse to comply with this unconstitutional action. As John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, “The powers of the legislature [Congress] are defined and limited.… To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing [in the Constitution], if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?” Any act of Congress in conflict with the Constitution was therefore “void,” according to Marshall. Other Founding Fathers, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton expressed similar sentiments.
If the states simply allow Congress to get away with this, we might as well say our federal system of government is no more — and that we no longer have a republican form of government.
