Let's be clear, mail-in voting is not the problem. There is nothing wrong with the concept. Never has been and never will be. The issue is verifying/validating that any given voter is authorized to vote and is who they say they are. If Congress (and the states) would take that issue seriously then we would not be talking about mail-in voting at all.
Talking about voter fraud: what system have we ever had that hasn't been decried for the potential for voter fraud? I'll admit there are elections that have been impacted due to voter fraud over the years but those are very few. In many, but not all, of those cases the votes were coerced yet legally cast.
In this whole debate we've lost sight of the facts which seems to be all too prevalent lately. When we don't have facts to support our position we make stuff up that can't be easily proven/disproven. When we have data but that data doesn't support our position we obfuscate the issue such that data becomes irrelevant and we appeal to emotions to supersede logic.
Those that have the legal right to vote should be allowed to vote by any means available. We should not be making it hard for anyone to vote as a means to influence elections. What we should be focusing on is using the vast array of technology available to us to ensure those who vote are entitled to vote and that their vote is in fact theirs. The reason we are not doing this is it removes an excuse for the losing side to obfuscate the facts and create uncertainty. This has not changed since the earliest days of elections in this great country. Bad actors have been trying to influence the will of the people through nefarious means since day one.
The simple fact that we are debating mail-in voting says the politicians have succeeded in planting seeds of doubt in the process without ever producing one single piece of data to prove that mail-in voting is the issue.
|