CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – A hypothetical: It’s 2am. A man with a backpack walks up to a ballot dropbox. What’s inside his backpack? 125 absentee ballots, harvested from a local nursing home. Under cover of darkness be puts the ballots into the dropbox and walks away.
The problem should be obvious. Once the ballots are dropped in the box, they are comingled with other legally-cast votes. It’s impossible to tell which is which.
In a non-dropbox world, the man would have to go into his clerk’s office. He’d arouse suspicion, and perhaps a call to the police, if he had any more than one ballot. Otherwise ballots would need to be sent via U.S. Mail. The signature requirements on the outer envelope make ballot harvesting much less feasible.
We don’t know for certain whether such activity took place before the November 2020 election. But we do know there was ballot harvesting at nursing homes. Using a dropbox, since declared illegal by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, is the most likely way to get those votes into the system.
Now comes a report from the Associated Press, saying dropboxes did not lead to widespread election fraud. Only – not quite. The AP reports, “the expanded use of drop boxes did not lead to any widespread problems, according to a survey of state election officials.” The report goes on to say there were no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft.
This is an attempt to debunk the movie “2,000 mules,” which the Associated Press says used a flawed analysis of cellphone location data.
Actually, it’s the claims from the Associated Press that are unverifiable. Unless dropboxes were under constant surveillance, how do we know they weren’t ballot receptacles for mules? In my 2am scenario, a survey of clerks offers no reassurance that it didn’t happen.
Thank goodness that dropboxes have been ruled illegal in Wisconsin. They were an invitation to cheat. At least getting rid of them makes election fraud harder.
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