Many Stanislaus voters distrusted mail elections, but no proof of fraud
On Dec. 15, my mother-in-law mailed Christmas gifts from her neighborhood post office in Orangevale, a Sacramento suburb, to various family members in Modesto, Texas and Utah. All were received in a couple of days, except ours.
On Dec. 17, the package meant for us arrived at the U.S. Postal Service’s international distribution center in San Francisco. The next day, it went to Sacramento, and on Dec. 21 it finally arrived in Modesto.
But we live just outside Modesto, and on Dec. 23 it went back to Sacramento. Cathy’s mother was heartsick at the thought that we wouldn’t get her present on time.
We know all this because the Postal Service has a nifty feature that lets you track online the status of the package you’re expecting, with a tracking number from the sender. I’m tempted to also use adjectives like “frustrating,” “diabolically maddening” or “amusing,” depending on my mood. Because over the course of three weeks, the tracking service logged 29 entries for our little nomad package, which was barely bigger than a greeting card.
In these three weeks, the package made four trips to Modesto, three to San Francisco and four to Sacramento. This Bermuda triangle was temporarily broken by a solitary stop on Dec. 26 in Stockton, because hey, why not try that one, too, before it continued on to one if its layovers in San Francisco.
Exasperated, my dear mother-in-law on Jan. 3 canceled the check she’d written as a Christmas gift, and sent another. Of course, the very next day the original package arrived in our mailbox.
A visit to Cathy’s parents in Orangevale is an 85-mile drive. In its three-week odyssey, our package traveled 1,089 miles.
Upon inspection, the problem was obvious: one digit in the hand-written ZIP code was off. The cycle seemed broken when, the tracking service suggests, a postal worker finally pulled the package from automated sorting, inserted the correct ZIP code and got it on the right track.
Curious about how these things work, I phoned Sandra McDowell, whose career in the Postal Service included delivery in Modesto, supervising in Manteca and 19 years as postmaster in Patterson.
“Maybe this should give us hope, because it shows the Postal Service is still doing its damnedest to deliver it,” she said, chuckling.
Distrust on a presidential scale
Why tell this tale?
Before the November election, I heard similar experiences recounted to undermine faith that ballots, all of which arrived in voters’ mail here and throughout California, would be counted correctly. “If they screwed up my letter so badly,” the line went, “why should I believe they won’t do the same with my ballot?”
Because they aren’t the same thing.
Your ballot was pre-addressed and prepaid, meaning all you had to do was drop it in the mail by election day — no handwriting (except for a signature) and no stamp needed. There just isn’t anything similar with that and the saga of our luckless little package.
“But,” you say, “the post office screws up all the time. Nearly every family has at least one horror story like this.”
True enough. But there simply is no evidence that postal ineptness caused election fraud, much less the widespread kind recounted ad nauseam by a twice-impeached president whose desire to sow distrust in an election he lost led to a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.
No widespread Stanislaus voter fraud
Our area, as I’ve said before, may be slowly moving left but can still pack a conservative punch.
Nearly 111,000 of the 217,517 November votes cast in Stanislaus County were not returned in the mail, but left in drop-off boxes and at satellite election offices scattered throughout the county. Some can be attributed to convenience — a few surely combined a trip for groceries with voting. But Republicans put out some of their own drop boxes, and the large number not returned in the mail suggests that their message of distrust had an effect.
I asked County Clerk-Recorder Donna Linder, who runs the elections department, how many November ballots arrived too late to count. Her answer: 240. And how many of those can definitely, without question be blamed on the Postal Service? None.
Most of the 240 by law could not be processed because they were postmarked after election day, Linder said. Meaning, blame for arriving late belongs with the voter, not the post office.
Linder’s office is running Modesto’s current mayoral runoff election between Sue Zwahlen and Doug Ridenour. Ballots went out in the mail Jan. 4, and must be returned by Feb. 2.
So far, more than 16,000 of Modesto’s 115,423 registered voters have returned their ballots, either by mail or various drop boxes — an improvement over the 13,726 sent in at this point in the last mayoral election. People are catching on.
If you’re still not convinced that our elections aren’t corrupt, remember that former County Supervisor Jim DeMartini — as conservative as they come — observed many hours of Stanislaus ballot counting over several days, and afterward pronounced the process clean and trustworthy.
Stories like the one about our wayfaring package may be fun or infuriating. What they aren’t is proof of widespread voter fraud.
This story was originally published January 18, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
