Coronavirus, the Post Office, Ballot Harvesting and–Last but Not Least–North Carolina | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: The author of this post is Sam Hieb for the John Locke Foundation.

    As long as coronavirus casts its pall over society-who knows how long that will be-the call for national voting by mail will no doubt increase. It's certainly no mistake that today's NYT editorial page had former presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar's call to require every state to allow its citizens to vote easily by mail next to an impassioned defense of the U.S. Postal Service.

    Greensboro resident Harvey Kuchei says 'Trust the post office with ballots? No way!'

• When I order something online, the post office will take two to five days to get the package from the Greensboro distribution center to my house in ZIP code 27407.
• The last package was shipped and received in one day by the Greensboro distribution center. Instead of going to the 27407 distribution center, the package went to the 27406 distribution center.
• It went back to the main distribution center, and then to the 27407 center and, finally, five days later to my house.
• Mailing ballots would be a disaster. Absolutely no voter would know if his or her ballot was counted in an election or not.

    I'll be honest-I am not a conservative critic of the Postal Service. In all my years using it, only once have I had a piece returned to a post office foul-up. But it's a fact that it's an overwhelmed system, and it makes no sense to burden it with none other than a presidential election. But that's what liberals do-pile onto already strained systems. Heritage Foundation's Hans Von Spakovsky who has been studying mail in voting for quite some time, tells The Daily Signal:

• Look, the problem with mail-in voting is basically this, in every state you can vote by absentee ballot, particularly if you're ill or disabled. And we obviously need that.
• But all-mail elections have all kinds of security problems. And the reason is very simple, these are the only kind of ballots that are being voted out of sight and out from under the supervision of election officials.
• That's why it is, unfortunately, easy to not just engage in fraud in those kinds of elections, but it's also easy for voters to be intimidated. And that's a cause for concern and should be a cause for concern for anyone interested in having an election process that is fair and has good security too.

    Von Spakovsky notes Klobuchar's bill legalizes ballot harvesting in all states, which is a bad idea. Why?

• A good example is North Carolina. North Carolina bans vote harvesting. And, if folks are interested in why that's a good idea, all they have to do is look at the 2018 congressional elections in North Carolina, the 9th Congressional District.
• Folks may recall, that was the only contested congressional race in the country in 2018. The race was overturned by the state election board because one of the candidates hired a notorious local political consultant with a very bad reputation who engaged in illegal vote harvesting.
• The evidence showed that they forged voter signatures, they filled out ballots, they changed votes when they went and collected those absentee ballots from voters in their homes.

    I can hear the argument now-that was Republicans doing that, and Republicans cheat. But Democrats don't. Right.