Voter fraud fictional, or 80% of us are morons

If Donald Trump is correct about mail-in ballots being fraud-filled and untrustworthy, then the 80% of Arizonans who vote by mail are morons. Suckers.

Although, what does that say about our elections? Like the time Trump outpolled Hillary Clinton by 3.5% in Arizona.

Hmm.

Among the comments Trump made recently about mail-in ballots is a tweet that reads: “The United States cannot have all Mail In Ballots. It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history.” False tweets about mail-in ballots got Twitter to add a note to users saying they should “get the facts about mail-in ballots.”

Five states have “all-mail” voting: Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii.

None of them report anything close to a rigged election. Or any significant fraud. Or practically any fraud.

The Brennan Center for Justice said the latest claims being made by Trump and other Republicans “are nothing more than old wine in new bottles.”

It went on to debunk what it called “10 voter fraud lies.”

Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, said problems with all-mail voting are “extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail, including the heavily Republican state of Utah.”

The Brennan Center ran the numbers of actual fraud cases and said the risk of voting fraud is 0.00004% to 0.0009%.

I’m no math whiz but I believe in layman’s terms that is infinitesimal.

A while back, Virginia Ross, the Pinal County recorder and president of the Arizona Recorders Association, and Lisa M. Marra, the Cochise County elections director and president of the Elections Officials of Arizona, wrote an op-ed for The Arizona Republic promoting ballot-by-mail during the pandemic.

They wrote in part, “Mailing ballots to voters is less complicated and less expensive compared to the massive logistical undertaking of finding, staffing, equipping, testing, sanitizing and maintaining hundreds of voting locations across the state. Doing so is comparable to opening a new business overnight, and the staffing alone takes the equivalent of a small army.”

Arizona voters already have the ability to get on a permanent early voting list and receive their ballots by mail. It’s what 8 in 10 of us already do. If you don’t yet, but would like to get such a ballot, you can do so by way of the Maricopa Count Recorder or the Secretary of State’s office.

If you haven’t done so already, you should.

Essentially, voting by mail is not only safe, democratically, but it affords voters the opportunity to avoid crowded polling stations during a pandemic.

Maybe that’s why Donald Trump, the most vocal critic of mail-in ballots, has voted by mail. Several times. So, too, has the first lady. So, too, has Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. And some of his senior advisers. And his press secretary.