David
509 posts
@DSims1010
Financial Advisor - Ameriprise Cornell University B.S. University of Oklahoma MBA Skiatook, OK
Ohio will be the first state in the country to implement merit-based pay for teachers & principals in our public schools. Pay for performance - period.
Governors @jaredpolis & @ChrisSununu share their biggest takeaways from last night's vice presidential debate:
Hi Amy! I'm happy to address ballot harvesting again. I did it A LOT when 2,000 Mules theory was popular (Remember that one? It turns out the real fraud in that one was the former convicted felon filmmaker D'Souza (who could have guessed?!) and the fly-by-night snake oil salespeople Engelbrecht and Phillips (again, who could have guessed?!)). If you're talking about ballot harvesting that consists of Criminal Carl offering to take the ballots of his neighbors to the Post Office box, then I agree, that's an unlawful act that is very hard to police, and Criminal Carl is not likely to be caught. But that's no what 2,000 Mules is about. And it's not the horror that is typically imagined when discussing ballot harvesting. Instead, we're usually imaging hundreds or thousands of early ballots that are harvested in a systematic fashion so as to benefit a particular candidate or party. After all, in this situation, Criminal Carl wants to influence a major election like the United States President! So let's take that. The first question is: how do you get the ballots? Ballot packets go out to registered voters. Every vote has to be linked to a voter profile. To create thousands of fake voters, you'd need to fake thousands of social security numbers, birth certificates, and have a mailing address. Not happening. So you have two options: 1) You can steal early ballots from mailboxes, or 2) you can go around asking for peoples' ballots. In option #1, I find it hard to believe that you could time mail delivery so as to steal hundreds or thousands of early ballot packets before the intended recipient gets it from his mailbox. But even if you did, as soon as the intended recipient calls into my office and says, "hey, I didn't get my ballot," then the gig is up, because the stolen mail ballots would be deactivated, only the new ballot would be "live," and the original ballot packet would never be opened -- a lot of work for nothing. And if my office started to hear of entire neighborhoods of ballot packets going missing, or thousands of packets from one area gone, then you'd better believe we would call in law enforcement. We haven't heard that, so we haven't done that. Now let's consider option 2 -- Criminal Carl goes around asking neighbors for their mail ballots. If Criminal Carl does this after the neighbors have voted, sealed, and signed their return envelope, then the harm to the election is basically a nullity. After all, those votes still reflect the will of the people, it's just Criminal Carl's transporting process is unlawful. But what if Criminal Carl goes around to his neighbors and says "I'll give you $10 if you give me your unmarked ballot, and you sign your return ballot affidavit envelope." That's possible. And I daresay it's happened. But if Criminal Carl did that 100 times, 1,000 times, or 10,000 times, I find it hard to believe that not a single one of those households that Criminal Carl approached said, "what the heck you weirdo?! I'm calling the cops." So those are my thoughts on ballot harvesting. Hope it's helpful. And hope it gives you more insight into the early voting process. Thanks! S P.S. This is about ballot harvesting generally, if you want information as to why "2,000 Mules" was a complete scam, that is abundantly available on the internet, including a detailed demonstration of how geolocation footage the movie shared purporting to be of Atlanta, Georgia actually turns out to be Moscow, Russia. Whoops! @AmyStaubach
