I Hate Mail-in Voting

The test of an electoral system is whether it can credibly be lied about.

Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

God is in the details — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others.

The secret ballot is democracy’s firewall. Mail-in voting is the fuel on which the Big Lie fire burns. To put out the fire, we must take away the fuel.

Listen to the tellers of the Big Lie. They have one obsession: mail-in voting. Why? Because it is easy to believe that mail-in voting can be hacked. That’s not to say that it can be hacked (I think it can, but that’s not my point here) or that any election has been corrupted by such hacking, as, apparently, none has, so far. But because many people can believe that mail-in voting can be hacked, one can credibly claim that it is has been, is being, or will be hacked. And that’s all it takes for a Big Lie to work.

By saying that mail-in voting can be “hacked,” I do not mean by fraud. I am using the term loosely to mean “subverted” by a cheater. One hears about mail-in ballots going to people who should have been purged from the voter rolls, which ballots may in fact be fraudulently returned and accepted because the addressee is on those rolls. But that’s really not where the problem lies, because that problem could be fixed by cleaning up the rolls. No, the real problem with mail-in voting is that it…