It’s impossible to argue that mail-in voting is anything but the least secure means of voting currently available in the United States.

I do not doubt that the Democrats will come up with even less secure means of voting, but for the moment, vote-by-mail and the use of drop boxes are at the top of the heap when it comes to making voter fraud easy and nearly impossible to detect.

Had Republicans been the ones to push the concept of near-universal weeks-long, impossible-to-verify voting, Democrats would be screaming from the rooftops about fraud, but since they came up with the idea and built an entire election infrastructure around the concept, privately funded the election mechanisms, and had the MSM prepared to back every ridiculous claim that the 2020 election was the most secure in history, we live in a world where you are considered a racist conspiracy theorist when you point out the obvious.

I don’t have proof that the 2020 election was stolen, and I think relitigating the results is pointless. Still, I have zero doubt that the Democrats did everything they could to game the system to ensure that any voter fraud that did take place–and it takes place in every election–was impossible to root out. If Democrats didn’t steal the election, they certainly created the conditions under which it would have been undetectable.

It is in this context that the Rasmussen poll I just read should be understood. Rasmussen, a polling company of disputed quality, asked people about how they voted in 2020 (the mechanism by which they voted) and whether the means they used complied with election law. They didn’t put it that way, of course. They asked questions that revealed the answer. Questions such as:

• How would you rate the job Joe Biden has been doing as President… do you strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove, or strongly disapprove of the job he’s been doing?
• If your state banned mail-in balloting in next year’s presidential election, would you choose to vote in-person or would you choose not to vote at all?
• We are now going to ask you several questions about voting in the 2020 Presidential election.  Your responses will remain anonymous, so please answer honestly.  Who did you vote for in the 2020 Presidential election?
•  Did you vote with an absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election?
• Answered by the 30% of respondents who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot: During the 2020 election, did a friend or family member fill out your ballot, in part or in full, on your behalf?
• During the 2020 election, did you fill out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?
• Answered by all:  During the 2020 election, did a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party, offer to pay or reward you for voting?
• Do you know a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance who has admitted to you that he or she cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than his or her state of permanent residence?
• Do you know a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance who has admitted to you that he or she filled out a ballot on behalf of another person?

NOTE: Margin of Sampling Error, +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence

Eight percent (8%) of ALL American likely voters say that a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party, offered to pay or reward them for voting in the 2020 election.

Estimated total U.S. likely voters – 160 Million https://t.co/X6AL6Fisw2

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) December 12, 2023

According to Rasmussen’s poll, 1 in 5 voters who cast votes by mail didn’t obey election law, although I would not agree with Rasmussen’s characterization that all these people “cheated.” That is a strong word. More appropriately, it would be best if you said that 1 in 5 broke election laws, and thus, their votes should not have been included in the election totals.

Thirty percent (30%) of those surveyed said they voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election. Nineteen percent (19%) of those who cast mail-in votes say a friend or family member filled out their ballot, in part or in full, on their behalf. Furthermore, 17% of mail-in voters say that in the 2020 election, they cast a ballot in a state where they were no longer a permanent resident. All of these practices are illegal, Heartland Institute officials noted.

“The results of this survey are nothing short of stunning,” said Justin Haskins, director of the Socialism Research Center at the Heartland Institute. “For the past three years, Americans have repeatedly been told that the 2020 election was the most secure in history. But if this poll’s findings are reflective of reality, the exact opposite is true. This conclusion isn’t based on conspiracy theories or suspect evidence, but rather from the responses made directly by the voters themselves.

If that number sounds high, it is not implausible. The more casual you make the voting process, the less seriously people will take it. The whole idea behind vote-by-mail is to get low-propensity voters to cast a ballot and, in many cases, to get low-propensity voters to allow others to do so.

You know it, and I know it, and the Democrats who push the idea know it too and bank on it. That is the point of ballot harvesting–getting people to allow others to cast their vote, and unsurprisingly, some do so for a reward of some kind.

Before you think that this is just conspiracy-mongering, paying people to cast ballots (or engage in other fraudulent activity) is about as common in American history as Southerners eating fried chicken or New Yorkers eating pastrami. “Walking around money” is a well-known phenomenon, and Chicago voter fraud became so famous that it became a punch line. So liberals, quit gaslighting about election fraud being inconceivable. We all know it happens.

The question is only at what scale, how it is done, and whether it changes election outcomes. And the only way to know that is to collect data. Data that Democrats try mightily to keep us from having. They won’t even let Secretaries of State clean voter rolls of dead people and ineligible voters, calling that voter suppression.

The post-2020 narrative that the election was “the most secure in history,” which many people believe by dint of its constant repetition, is absurd on its face. Almost nothing was done to secure the election, and as Rasmussen shows, a lot of people polled will admit that they didn’t follow the law. Who they are, whether they are remembering correctly or telling the truth now, and a lot of other questions should be answered as best we can.

But there is zero question that a LOT of people broke the law, and as we have seen in Connecticut and other states, the cheating continues. An election in Connecticut was just nullified because of voter fraud of precisely the type we all know happened in 2020. We only know it because it was caught on tape, and the election pitted two Democrats against each other. If it had been R vs. D, I doubt the media would have covered it.

It is annoying that so many people are spending more time fighting about 2020 than fighting to win in 2024, but I get their frustration. If I had to bet, I would bet big that 2020 was stolen, but unless you can prove it, then relitigating it is little more than mental onanism. Put your head down and win the next one. As Hugh Hewitt likes to say, we need more votes than the margin of cheating.

Is that fair? Obviously not. Is it a reality? Obviously so, at the moment. We can argue about reform when we get power. We need the power first.