Mail voter fraud

My request to write a guest column on a timely issue was denied by The Capital. The newspaper reported my concerns but only scratched the surface and relegated me to explain further in very few words.

Historically, election fraud has been prevalent across the world and yet America has mostly avoided it because of our democracy and safeguards put into place. When a state dramatically changes its election process, as recently seen in Maryland, we cannot rely on the past to safeguard our future.

Corresponding safeguards must be put into place or dishonesty will raise its fraudulent head. Maryland changed to primarily a mail-in election without any additional safeguards. Therefore, we asked for mailed-in ballot signature verification as done in 31 other bipartisan states.

The request was ignored.

This notion that our election system is free from any dishonest people is naïve and dangerous. Every other area of life has fraud and dishonest people.

An unprecedented 2 million unrequested, sent out and unused ballots will be sitting around waiting for fraudulent activity. This creates an easy way to commit fraud by filling out someone else’s ballot, signing it, and mailing it in on time. The ballot is then accepted without question.

With races being decided by a few votes, it doesn’t take a grand conspiracy to change the outcome.

The Board of Elections checks for a person voting multiple times, but has no plans to protect against someone sending another person’s unused mail-in ballot. With 2 million unused ballots, that’s a huge area of likely fraud to ignore!

The safeguards do not deny anyone a ballot or disenfranchise any voters. It simply ensures the person that sent the ballot matches the actual voter on file.

It’s difficult to find fraud when you won’t even look for it, and that’s a sad commentary on our new election process!

State Sen. BRYAN SIMONAIRE Pasadena