In a perfect world, voters would be required to show up on Election Day to cast their ballots. Unfortunately, the pandemic handed Democrats a golden opportunity to implement mail-in voting and its close cousins, early voting and ballot harvesting, on an unprecedented scale. As dangerous and unpalatable as these activities may be, they are here to stay.
By Election Day, Democratic candidates, who have been getting out the vote for weeks, are often way ahead of their Republican rivals, who start the day with a serious vote deficit.
The Messenger’s Kristin Tate highlighted just how pervasive – and pivotal – the use of mail-in voting was in the 2020 election in a recent article.
In 2020, only about a third of Americans voted at a physical polling location on Election Day. … The expansion of Election Day to “Election Month” brought out a number of lower-propensity, and arguably lower-information, voters who cast their ballots by the millions. Young people increased their voting share sharply in the last election.
In some states, the changes were even more dramatic. Between 2016 and 2020, New Jersey saw its share of mail ballots increase from just 7% to an astounding 86%. The partisan lean should be no more surprising. Among voters in Pennsylvania who voted by mail, 76% went for Joe Biden. In Maryland, it was 81%. In the crucial state of Georgia, Trump received just 34% of the mail-in ballots.
The 2020 trampling of precedent under the guise of an “emergency” was especially pronounced in critical states such as Pennsylvania, where officials were ordered to count mail-in ballots that arrived within three days after the election toward the final result — even those that did not have a postmark. The move undoubtedly had a massive impact on the swing state’s outcome.
Regrettable as it is, mail-in voting is here to stay. This means that if Republicans ever plan to win another election, we need to hop on the bandwagon – fast. We must master vote-by-mail and the other techniques that have worked so well for Democrats in the past few election cycles, or we will continue to lose otherwise winnable races.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won reelection by nearly 20 points last year, showed us just how it’s done. In April 2022, the governor signed Senate Bill 524, Election Administration, into law. This legislation was aimed at strengthening election integrity in the state.
Provisions of the bill included “requiring voter rolls to be annually reviewed and updated, strengthening ID requirements, establishing the Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate election law violations, and increasing penalties for violations of election laws.”
At the bill-signing ceremony, DeSantis reminded reporters of the debacle that had occurred in the state following the 2000 presidential election. He then explained the steps his administration has taken to ensure secure elections.
Twenty years ago, nobody thought Florida was a prime example of how to conduct elections, but we have become a national leader by running the most secure elections in the country. We need to do more to ensure our elections remain secure. We have ended ballot harvesting, stopped drop boxes and the mass mailing of ballots, and banned Zuckerbucks, and this bill will give us more resources to make sure bad actors are held accountable.
I’ve certainly been wrong before, but I am firmly convinced that, if not for the introduction of nearly universal mail-in voting in 2020, early voting, and the widespread use of ballot harvesting, former President Donald Trump would have won reelection.
Republicans should have been better prepared to thwart the Democrats’ chicanery in 2020. Perhaps they underestimated the length to which the party would go to win.
Three years later, we know that Democrats will do anything to remain in power.
We must do better. America can’t survive another five years of Democratic rule.
A previous version of this article appeared on Power Line.
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The way I see it, there are two key components to ballot harvesting and its affect on the outcomes.
The first one, which is the near-legal component, is that it makes it easier for someone that might vote to actually cast a ballot. In this part we probably can, and should, figure out how to compete with the Dems at their game.
The key here is that in this component the number of ballots cast roughly approximates the number of voters that would, if they were willing to put in the effort, would vote in the election. But, the key here is that the Dems are treating this as a priority of the national party and using big money money. I’m pretty sure that, where the Republican candidates do it, they rely on each candidate to do organize these efforts rather than having it organized by a more professional staff, resulting in far less effective efforts for our side.
The second key component of ballot harvesting, that the Dems use to great effect, is that it provides the Dems with the ability to cheat in any number of ways and, in this form of ballot harvesting, the Republicans would rarely if ever match the scale of cheating that the Dems would engage in. The key here is that, for this form of cheating to alter the outcomes of our elections, it must be done at a large enough scale that it can move the needle in the election.
My thinking is that, where we can’t outlaw ballot harvesting, we should learn how to do the first type of ballot harvesting as good, or better than, the Dems do it.
With the second type of ballot harvesting, the illegal part, and this is IMHO, the key weakness to this part of the ballot harvesting is that at that scale it should be detectable and subject to exposure by the GOP, that is, if they want to organize and use it.we should figure out how to detect it and use it against the Dems.