Why mail-only ballots pose little threat of election fraud in Stanislaus County
Of all the things to worry about these days in Stanislaus County, election fraud should not be anywhere near the top.
That’s important to know as we head into the first election in history where every voter in the county will receive a ballot in the mail.
It could be the first time in their lives, for an election of this magnitude, that about 61,000 voters here will confront that piece of mail when it arrives Oct. 6 or 7. They might be confused because they didn’t ask for a mail ballot; they’ve always gone to vote at a neighborhood polling station in a nearby school, library, church, fire station or some such venue.
They might further be confused because they’ve heard that no less an authority than the president of the United States recently tweeted that “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE.” They’ve also heard that the Russians tried to tamper with our 2016 election, and will do the same this year.
They might have heard that one party in 2018 mid-terms out-hustled the other with get-out-the-vote efforts, which Republicans scorn as “ballot harvesting” while Democrats call it “community ballot collection.”
They might even remember that congressional candidate Ted Howze penned a long column in another newspaper attributing Josh Harder’s win over incumbent Jeff Denham that year to a vast conspiracy of election fraud, backed up with loads of suspicion and no proof. Howze promised that his team would “follow up on this investigation as soon as the new data becomes available;” apparently, it never did.
In the past two decades, voters across the U.S. have cast more than 250 million mail ballots, and authorities have secured 143 criminal convictions for election fraud, the National Vote at Home Institute found in a recent collaboration with the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. That’s an average of one case per state every six or seven years, or a fraud rate of 0.00006%, the authors concluded.
The following is meant to put minds at ease. First we’ll address the 23% who are new to mail voting — the 61,000 I mentioned earlier.
- Those who have never voted by mail still don’t have to. Although everyone will receive a ballot in the mail, you’re not required to return it that way.
- If dropping an envelope in the mailbox just isn’t your thing, or you don’t have confidence it will arrive and be properly counted, you’re free to visit one of several satellite voting stations sprinkled throughout the county, with exact locations soon to be announced. You can leave your completed ballot there, or get a brand new one and vote on the spot like you always have.
- If you’re not comfortable visiting a satellite voting station — perhaps it’s not your familiar polling place, or you don’t want to take a chance at catching the coronavirus — other drop-off boxes will be available at your local city clerk’s office. If you’d rather combine voting with a trip for groceries, a list of grocery stores designated as official drop-off spots soon will be announced as well. Check back at stanvote.com, or look for a postcard with helpful info arriving shortly.
The remaining 77% of Stanislaus voters, or about 206,000, are registered to vote by mail, so we’ll assume they don’t need a pep talk on its convenience. But they might find it helpful to learn about this county’s history of voter fraud on the scale warned of by very stable geniuses.
Some horrendous things, we can count. For example, the San Francisco Giants lost 85 games in 2019. There were 32 homicides in Stanislaus County in 2019. As of Thursday, 151 of our people had been killed by COVID-19.
Now for the number of documented cases of local election fraud: 1.
A woman was convicted for a misdemeanor violation having to do with voter registration fraud in a case filed in 2005, District Attorney Birgit Fladager said.
Donna Linder told me in a Wednesday telephone interview that she’s proud of security systems protecting the voting process. She usually is identified as our county clerk-recorder, but her other title is voter registrar, and her duties include running the elections office since January 2019.
Stanislaus election security
The process of counting ballots is more complicated than you might think, but security boils down to two main safeguards: the internal tallying computer can’t be breached because it’s not hooked up to the outside world, and all mail ballots — or every one, in the coming election — must be signed by the voter casting it. And election workers verify every signature.
Has Linder ever seen anyone try to commit voter fraud in this county?
“I really haven’t,” Linder said. The closest thing might be when someone votes soon after receiving a ballot, about a month before the election, then forgets and tries to vote again at a polling station; the bar code system disallows his second ballot.
That’s an isolated mistake, not massive voter fraud. Why then do we keep hearing scary warnings?
“People see something in Facebook and they take it as gospel,” Linder said.
Well sure, a skeptic may retort — what answer should we expect from the person in charge?
That’s a fair question.
Maybe an independent third party should investigate. Maybe an entire panel of civic-minded individuals should take a careful look and issue a detailed report of everything they find wrong with the Stanislaus elections office.
They did.
Grand jury: “No fraud here”
Aware that the threat of mail-ballot fraud is a hot topic, the Stanislaus County civil grand jury conducted an exhaustive probe into Linder’s process, including scrutinizing the March Primary, and reported what they found to the county Board of Supervisors less than two weeks ago. Although we must remain vigilant, Stanislaus practices are essentially air tight, grand jurors said.
Linder several weeks ago made the decision to go to all-mail balloting for November because only a quarter of her trusty army of volunteers — many of them, seniors vulnerable to the virus — proclaimed themselves available to help this time, and virtually no traditional neighborhood polling place could commit because of concerns for social distancing.
About the same time in early May, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that all voting throughout California in November be conducted via mail, because of the coronavirus. A court challenge was negated when the state Legislature in June approved the same thing with Assembly Bill 860.
Smart Republicans this year will have learned from prior Democratic strategy and figured out how to make it work for them. That might be the only sure way to put to rest the myth of massive election fraud.
This story was originally published August 10, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
