President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump walk across the South Lawn of the White House Wednesday, May 27, 2020, returning from their trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Kit Knightly explains at Off Guardian that, despite Twitter flagging the President’s tweets about mail-in balloting, the president is in fact accurate. Knightly writes:
So why now? Why is twitter “fact-checking” Trump’s claim that postal ballots are easier to rig?
Well, it’s certainly not because he’s wrong. Because he’s actually right.
Postal ballots ARE much easier to rig than in-person voting. This is not just logically obvious, it is historically shown to be true through dozens of examples.
In 2002, a Labour councillor was convicted of voter fraud after acquiring 200 blank postal ballots, filling them in and adding them to the uncounted votes.
In 2005, when on-demand postal voting was first spreading around Britain, many councils expressed concerns that the system was vulnerable to fraud. These fears were repeated in 2010, when there was a surge in those using the system.
In 2014 the electoral commission warned that “ghost voters” could be created using mail-in ballots.
Also in 2014 Richard Mawrey QC, a UK deputy High Court judge in charge of hearing electoral fraud cases, warned that on-demand postal ballots were open to “systematic and widespread” voter fraud.
This was echoing thoughts he first expressed in 2005, after finding 6 Labour councillors guilty of postal ballot-related fraud schemes.
Mawrey repeated those concerns again in 2015, after former Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman was convicted of election fraud using postal votes.
In Decmeber 2019 Steve Baker MP wrote that:
There is widespread abuse of postal votes, this simply cannot go on
That same month, the BBC’s political editor accidentally revealed a serious potential corruption on the postal ballot front.
Now, all of these examples are from the UK but the same frailties exist in the United States.
In fact, just two years ago, a Republican candidate was found to have committed electoral fraud in North Carolina…using absentee postal ballots.
In 2007 Teresa James and Michael Slater of Project Vote authored a report titled “Vote By Mail Doesn’t Deliver” in which they found there was evidence that:
Vote by mail is more susceptible to corruption than voting at polling places.
And:
Vote by mail is amenable to manipulation by election officials.
They cite multiple examples, including the Miami mayoral election of 1997 being overturned by the courts after a candidate was found to have committed widespread absentee ballot fraud.
As recently as March of this year, when Joe Biden repeatedly won primaries he was predicted to lose, there were reported irregularities in postal ballots in several states, including Wisconsin, New Jersey and Ohio.
So, if there are so many recent examples of fraud – and so many obvious potential vulnerabilities to the system – why is Twitter suddenly (incorrectly) fact-checking “The Donald”?
