Kerby Anderson

Proponents of expanding mail-in balloting argue that most of the concerns being raised are hypothetical and might not even take place. Well, now we have an example out of New Jersey that is so significant that nearly one in five ballots had to be rejected as fraudulent.

Patterson is the third-largest city in New Jersey. In their City Council election, 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes were disqualified by the board of elections. Some groups, like the NAACP, even called for the entire election to be disqualified.

Over 800 ballots were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled. Another 2,390 were disqualified because the signatures on them did not match the signatures on the voter records. And there were stories of people who discovered they supposedly had voted and said they never received a ballot and did not vote.

Individuals who study elections have long concluded that voting by mail accounts for the most common type of voter fraud. The example from Patterson, New Jersey illustrates that so well. It also illustrates how voter fraud can affect very close elections. Initially, a challenger in one seat defeated an incumbent by eight votes (1,729 to 1,721).

Consider that this was just a local election, but still ended up with 3,190 fraudulent votes cast in a single county in New Jersey. You can begin to extrapolate to whole states that are pushing for mail-in-voting to see the potential problem that could arise. We have at least 378 counties in which there are more voter registrations than there are citizens of voting age in the county. Some voters have moved away. Others are registered more than once. Voters who have died are still on the rolls.

Mail-in election fraud isn’t just a hypothetical threat. It is a real danger.