I must take issue with Jay Evensen’s recent column in Sunday’s paper concerning mail-in voting. Judicial Watch, a very respected organization, has found eight Iowa counties that have more voter registrations than their eligible voting-age population. Last year California began removing up to 1.5 million “inactive” names from Los Angeles County voter rolls. Kentucky cleaned up to 150,000 names last year.
In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a voter roll cleanup in Ohio while a federal court ordered Maryland to produce voter list data for its largest county. Similar issues took place in Indiana. In my own experience, my granddaughter and her husband lived with us for a while before moving and she received a mail-in ballot here at our house. We could have easily filled out the ballot without her knowledge and sent it in with a signature, especially had she moved out of state without the state’s knowledge.
Has Jay ever heard of ‘ballot harvesting?’ with unused ballots laying around and available to the unscrupulous. This mail in balloting ignores ID requirements in most cases and leaves the system open to fraud — as we saw in Florida during the 2018 election — with the eventual resignation of the county clerk. Let’s keep our elections on a picture ID basis and do it in person. If not, there must be signature matching of every ballot turned in — an inordinate task it seems to me.
Doug Brinley
Provo