Don't Go Postal!
Fund urges in today's Wall Street Journal, his screed today against a mail-in primary in the states of Michigan and Florida.
Fund's whining is moot because neither state is springing for a re-do of their January primaries.
But that doesn't stop him from sermonizing on how bad the idea of voting by mail is.
For too long, both parties have encouraged the growth of mail-in ballots (also known as absentee voting), to the point that some 3 out of 10 votes in national elections are now cast before Election Day. Little thought has been given to the security problems attendant to absentee voting. Politicians have tended to ignore complaints because constituents like the convenience of voting from home. Oregon and Washington state have moved to virtually all-mail elections, in part because the cost is as little as one-third as much as a regular precinct-based system.
Obviously, Fund holds a sizable chunk of Diebold stock and he wouldn't like the idea of mail-in paper ballots to catch on.
He reaches a high-point of hilarity when he suggests:
Florida also has a rich history of problems with absentee ballots. "The lack of in-person, at-the-polls accountability makes absentee ballots the tool of choice for those inclined to commit fraud," the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded in 1998, after a mayoral election in Miami was thrown out when officials learned that "vote brokers" had signed hundreds of phony absentee ballots. A panel of state appellate judges ordered a new election, noting that "unlike the right to vote, which is assured every citizen by the Constitution, the ability to vote by absentee ballot is a privilege."
How very strange, Mr. Fund, that's not my recollection of balloting problems in Florida at all.
The far bigger problems in Florida involve large blocks of Florida citizens who are prevented from voting, something called "voter caging," I believe.
Then there is the little matter of tens of thousands of Democratic votes suddenly disappearing from electronic voting machines in hotly contested districts.
Voter fraud is a made-up issue. Election fraud is not.
Fund is also viciously building a case for the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service:
Fraud isn't the only problem with relying on the mail for collecting votes. Just last week, the U.S. Postal Service lost more than 1,100 absentee ballots for a special state legislative election in Florida. Postal officials have no record of what happened to them. That worries Toni Molinaro, chairman of the Democratic Party in St. Petersburg: "The worst-case scenario is that someone took them and is going to do something fraudulent with them."
In 2004 Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, mailed 58,000 absentee ballots out that didn't arrive on time--or, in some cases, ever. Mike Slater, deputy director of the nonpartisan Project Vote registration group, told the Palm Beach Post that election officials, not postal workers, should be the main overseers of elections: "Mail is an unreliable tool."
Um, what about the Republican thugs who shut down vote counting in Miami-Dade in 2000?
What about the U.S. prosecutors who weren't fired because they followed orders to harry Democratic candidates just prior to elections?
Or the U.S. prosecutors who were fired because they didn't follow orders regarding elections?
David Iglesias, New Mexico, John McKay, Washington State, just a couple of names that come immediately to mind.