BERNARDSVILLE, NJ – New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy issued an executive order mandating that all registered voters in the state receive mail-in ballots in advance of the state’s primary, currently slated for July 7th.
The ballots were mailed. And things are already showing the flaw in a complete vote-by-mail election.
Of the 2,400 registered Republicans in the city of Bernardsville, between 21% and 29% received a ballot for the Democratic ticket, from president all the way down.
“The slate of candidates was all Democrat from Joe Biden down to dogcatcher, but on the upper right it clearly stated it was a Republican ballot and it had my name and correct information on the return envelope,” Bernardsville Republican Municipal Committee chairwoman Karen Gardner said, according to NJ.com.
Ordinarily, the county clerk’s office prepares the ballots themselves, but they farmed the task out to Reliance Graphics.
“It was a misprint,” said Bob Fetterly, the president of Reliance. “Human error. We mailed over 1.5 million ballots in the last couple of weeks and 500 went astray. So we apologized for it, but it was a human error… we had a success rate of 99.99 percent.”
The quick turn-around time necessary to meet the governor’s mandate was blamed for the fact that the work was sub-contracted and ultimately sent with the wrong information. .
“If we had had a greater lead time when we were sending out these ballots, we would have been able to do the ballot insertion in-house and this error would have been caught,” Somerset County Clerk Steve Peter said.
“Come November, I have implored the governor and everybody in the legislature that I can talk to… that if we do have an all or mainly vote-by-mail election that that decision be made no later than August 1st so that we would have adequate time to prepare these ballots and we can do the insertion in our office to ensure quality control.”
Bernardsville mayor Jane Canose, a Republican, doesn’t think fraud played a part in this instance, but said:
“You can’t have printer errors. I think that’s a problem.”
New ballots were sent to all registered Republican voters in the county, along with an explanation. The original ballots will be voided, and Reliance is absorbing the costs of the error.
“Corrected ballots with a slip explaining the error were sent back out to all 2,400 Bernardsville Republicans on June 16. The erroneous ballots will be voided, and even so, Republican voters cannot cast votes for Democrats in a New Jersey primary. Reliance will swallow the reprinting and postage costs, at no added expense to taxpayers, Peter said.”
Republicans across the country have been concerned that mail-in voting would leave this election at risk of fraud. But many on the left believe that argument to be false.
“Progressive politicians like Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) have dismissed such concerns as “BS,” despite no shortage of examples demonstrating the risks involved with widespread vote-by-mail. Officials in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for example, admitted last month that an unknown number of duplicate ballots were sent out to registered voters, though they claim that the issue has since been resolved.”
Adding events like these in Pittsburgh, which are not the only reports of this type of occurrence, to the nearly 28.4 million mail-in ballots that have gone missing over the course of the last four election cycles, it is no wonder that people are worried. We shared the story of the need to purge voter records in Detroit.
We recently detailed the allegations of fraud in a Paterson, NJ election that was conducted entirely through mail-in ballots due to the stay-at-home orders enacted as part of the COVID-19 response.
The President has been warning about it… and many are denying it’s “a thing”. So welcome to the latest example of voter fraud.
United States President Donald Trump issued a warning concerning mail in voting being a way to introduce voter fraud if expanded. He recently tweeted:
“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”
Attorney General William Barr told Fox News that voting by mail “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.”
Barr stated:
“Right now, a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots, and it’d be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot. So, I think it can — it can upset and undercut the confidence in the integrity of our elections. If anything, we should tighten them up right now.”
These reports were taken as a conspiracy theory, something that cannot happen in the United States.
One ‘expert,’ Lawrence Norden, who is the director for the Election Reform Program for the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York School of Law, stated that his belief that this type of voter fraud was “nonsense.”
Yet, in Paterson, New Jersey, elections were held strictly through mail in ballots due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
As a result, it is suspected that fraud was done and made easier due to people being forced to use mail in ballots. Perhaps not a foreign entity, but, fraud, nonetheless. Two of the people charged in the case are the winners of the election.
Four people were charged with voter mail fraud, among them were Councilman Michael Jackson and Councilman-Elect Alex Mendez.
The criminal investigation started when the United States Postal Inspection Service reported hundreds of mail-in ballots being in the mailbox in the area which is something out of the ordinary if mailed normally.
It is alleged that all four persons involved in this scheme unlawfully collected the ballots, potentially changed the votes, and turned them into the post office.
Councilman-Elect Mendez has been charged with second-degree election fraud amongst five other crimes.
It is alleged that Mendez handled one or more applications which he knew or should have known “false, fictitious, or fraudulent, in that he knew the person for whom the application was procured was not eligible to vote in the election district identified on the application,” according to authorities.
According to New Jersey State Attorney General, Gurbir Grewal:
“Today’s charges send a clear message: if you try to tamper with an election in New Jersey, we will find you and we will hold you accountable. We will not allow a small number of criminals to undermine the public’s confidence in our democratic process.”
The charges against all of those involved come from a state investigation into the elections in Paterson. The investigation into this election was known by some in the political realm after there were allegations, apparently for good reason, of fraud during the vote by mail process.
Investigators advise that this criminal case is still ongoing.
There are other candidates in this election which have accused others of stealing their votes or implying in some manner that fraud has happened which has caused them to lose the election. It is unclear if any others in this probe will be criminally charged.
It turns out that President Trump’s concern of voter fraud, at least in this instance, may be correct. It did not take much for those involved to, at minimum, take the ballots from those who were participating in the election. Whether the votes were actually changed or not, that is up to a jury to decide.
Mail-in voting seems to always guarantee one thing: missing or undeliverable ballots.
According to reports detailed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the last four election cycles from 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 has seen over 28 million mail-in ballots go missing in one way or another.
When looking at 2012, there was slightly over 33 million ballots sent out via mail. Of those shot out, over 3.7 million of them came back as “Status Unknown” according to the 2012 report.
That’s not including the over 425,000 that came back as “Undeliverable.” Every one of those ballots that goes missing or undelivered can be exploited for fraudulent voting.
A million missing ballots is a million opportunities for foul play.
That's a hard no on vote by mail. It just a method to cheat. 28 million votes by mail have been misplaced or ignored. If people can grocery shop & go to Home Depot they can go to the polls to cast a vote. Ballot harvesting is not acceptable. I want my vote to count!
Defeat this!!— Darrell Boone (@tazmandb) April 17, 2020
So, one would be hardly surprised that 2014 carried some of the same kind of shenanigans, just with higher “Status Unknown” mail-in ballots. Over 8 million ballots were listed as “Status Unknown,” with over 600,000 ballots being listed as “Undeliverable.”
We reported before on the fiasco that was mail-in voting between 2016 and 2018, which was what brought us up to this near-thirty-million sum of mail-in ballots gone missing. Here’s the 2016 and 2018 details we mentioned earlier in April:
Research shows that between the 2016 and 2018 elections, a healthy amount of mail-in ballots went missing in some way or another.
Over 16 million ballots to be precise, between the two election years.
When reviewing the 2018 midterm elections, approximately 42.4 million ballots were mailed out to registered voters. Out of all those mail-in ballots shot out to voters, about 1 million were “undeliverable,” over 430,000 were listed as “rejected,” and 10.5 million simply went missing.
This is why democrats want mail in voting. They make sure the people picking up the ballots are liberal democrat criminals. https://t.co/kc12aFiWxf
— Quibble (@quibbleframeup) April 11, 2020
Each and every time something like that transpires, it can be exploited.
Going back to the infamous 2016 election, roughly 41.6 million ballots were sent out to registered voters. In that instance, about 320,000 were “rejected,” over 568,000 mail-in ballots were described as “undeliverable,” and nearly 6 million ballots went missing overall.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation conducted the immense study pertaining to mail-in ballots, exposing the obvious flaws that exist on the smaller scale versus what’s being suggested by Democrats today.
J. Christian Adams, who serves as the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, stated the following about the findings:
“These represent 16 million opportunities for someone to cheat. Absentee ballot fraud is the most common; the most expensive to investigate; and can never be reversed after an election. The status quo was already bad for mail balloting. The proposed emergency fix is worse.”
The logic presented by Adams is spot on. If the current system of mail-in ballots shows already creates easy exploits for voter fraud, expanding the system only expands the gaps and vulnerabilities.
Certain areas during the 2018 midterms were hit harder than other for missing ballots. For instance, various counties in California saw over 3 million missing ballots in 2018, with 1.4 million of those intended only for Los Angeles, California.
Also, Maricopa County, Arizona had over 400,000 missing ballots in 2018; as well as King County, Washington losing around 353,000 in 2018.
That a lot of room for fraud to occur.
We even have a recent example stemming from Wisconsin, where hundreds of absentee ballots simply went undelivered. Then, they were magically discovered after local voting deadlines had passed.
BIG problems with Mail-In Voting in Wisconsin this week ??
"Attention turned to missing absentee ballots Wednesday as state officials reported three tubs of them were discovered in a mail processing center…"https://t.co/IHXx7hpLuS
— Cari Kelemen (@KelemenCari) April 11, 2020
Republican Sen. Dan Feyen commented on the situation with missing absentee ballots in the state:
“I learned today that the (Wisconsin Elections Commission) received a call from a postal service worker informing them 3 large tubs of absentee ballots from Oshkosh and Appleton, were just located.”
Meagan Wolfe, an administrator for the WEC, said she was communicating with the U.S. Postal Service about what might have gone wrong. So far, she hasn’t gotten any suitable response to satisfy ongoing inquiries:
“We don’t have answers on that at this point.”
But sure, mail-in voting would be perfectly fine for the national election later this year.
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