Mail-In Ballot Controversy

 AC Press Editorial

There are important reasons why the partisan push to flood New Jersey with mail-in ballots is bad. No. 1 is that it undermines faith in fair and honest elections.

Turns out there’s another reason — still serious but less dangerous to democracy — that has undone Democratic efforts to create a vast vote-by-mail scheme that is poorly managed and insufficiently secure.

A couple of weeks ago, the N.J. Council on Local Mandates voided two laws enacted by Democrats that more than quadrupled mail ballots to about 600,000 in the November election. Fewer than half of them were used.

  The council is charged with enforcing the 1995 “State Mandate, State Pay” constitutional amendment to protect local property taxpayers. That bars the state from enacting costly rules for local government without providing the means to pay for them.

The Legislature’s Democrats twice passed and Gov. Phil Murphy signed bills just weeks before elections requiring counties to send mail-in ballots to hundreds of thousands of New Jersey residents who didn’t request them.

Anyone who asked for an absentee or vote-by-mail ballot in three previous years got one whether they wanted it or not.

This sudden flood of mail-in ballots caused errors and chaos in the election process, and cost counties at least $3 million. They had to bolster their election operations with employees inexperienced in vote processing and increase the use of temporary workers. In Atlantic County the past year, expanded mail-in balloting cost at least $138,000, according to data assembled by NJ Spotlight. Added county costs in Ocean were $200,000, in Cape May $57,000 and Cumberland, $83,000.

The N.J. Association of Counties complained to the Council on Local Mandates, which determined these two laws were unfunded mandates and therefore void under the constitution.

This may prompt the governor and legislative Democrats to find money for the vast vote-by-mail push, which they justify as an attempt to increase voter turnout.

Instead, they should consider whether their partisan gains from a massive, insufficiently secured voting system is worth the damage to the public’s confidence that their votes matter.

When you vote at your polling place, you must present yourself and sign the book next to your prior signature (now upside down) — watched by representatives of the major parties.

But what happens to the more than half a million ballots distributed by mail? Who’s watching where they go? Who sees them signed, or even later verifies the signature convincingly? What’s to stop a vote-fraud operation from lining up thousands of mail ballots — now not even requested by voters — and pressuring or paying for signatures on already filled out ballots? Not enough, plainly.

In Atlantic County, Republicans repeatedly have received the most votes at the polls, but then lost when boxes of ballots mailed in or delivered by messengers contained an avalanche of Democratic votes. Republicans have complained and sometimes provided credible evidence of vote fraud, but to no avail.

 On Monday, a Superior Court judge granted recounts in two local elections. In Atlantic City, a council candidate who led at the polls was defeated by a foe who got triple her number of mail-in votes. In a Pleasantville Board of Education contest, voting booths produced a lead that was destroyed by more than 700 mail-in and messenger ballots. The defeated candidates vowed to contest the election, but to overturn the vote they’d have to prove on their own that many ballots already accepted by officials are invalid — an impossibility given the loose handling of mail-in and messenger ballots.

More than three years ago, we said that “as a matter of principle, changes … to how representatives are elected to government should be made with broad bipartisan support.” That is the only way the public can be sure that one party isn’t using its dominance to rig elections in its favor.

Democrats need to understand this bedrock principle of democracy and back off from their self-serving shift of voting toward less secure methods with questionable outcomes. They should find funding for ensuring the legitimacy of voting in New Jersey — modern, verifiable voting machines, for example — not for their mail-ballot push.

https://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/opinion/editorials/rethink-mailed-ballot-deluge-voided-as-an-unfunded-mandate/article_8f2d541b-4620-55c6-86b8-ede3211ae82b.html

Related articles
https://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/politics/automatic-vote-by-mail-laws-voided-by-state-council/article_b0d0b52f-71f3-5324-b67f-1b8c2a56d078.html#1

https://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/opinion/editorials/new-jersey-and-atlantic-county-officials-must-fix-their-mail/article_5a859b8d-0f8a-52a8-9de0-3b605a093b52.html