Vote-by-mail is a mess. And the only answer is voter ID, as in Proposition 39.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court declined to block an executive order by President Donald Trump that restricts vote-by-mail.
Among other things, the order requires the US Postal Service to obtain lists of registered voters from the states, and to make sure that any ballots sent by mail are only delivered to people on the rolls.
Democrats, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, are vowing to continue fighting in the courts.
These battles are terrible for democracy.
Once, absentee voting was rare, and reserved only for special cases — such as military duty, or a health emergency.
Then several western states — including California — decided to offer vote-by-mail more widely, as a convenience.
It may have been coincidence, but in vote-by-mail states, Democrats won victory after victory. Republicans found themselves virtually shut out of state politics.
To Democrats, that was just evidence that low-propensity voters preferred their party, and would vote Democratic once voting was made easy and convenient enough.
To Republicans, vote-by-mail began to look suspicious. They cited bipartisan studies that suggested absentee voting was the form of voting most susceptible to fraud.
But both sides more or less accepted the system — until the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
That was when Democrats decided to claim that voting in person at polling places was just too dangerous. They wanted vote-by-mail to be automatic — to have ballots sent to everyone who was registered to vote.
It was all nonsense. Other democracies, notably South Korea and Israel, held in-person elections during the height of the pandemic, without seeing a spike in COVID infections.
But when Democrats and Republicans went to court, judges were terrified of being accused of condemning voters to death. So they rolled over and gave Democrats what they wanted.
The high error rate for absentee ballots in primary elections caused observers to warn that the November election could be disputed.
And so it was, after early leads for President Donald Trump were reversed overnight once the mail-in vote was counted.
Trump claimed that there was fraud, though Republicans never produced evidence to back that up.
Nevertheless, public trust in the system — such as it was — would never be the same.
We cannot have a functioning democracy if we have a system of voting that only one side trusts.
Moreover, it is a system that almost no one else in the world uses — precisely because of the potential for fraud.
It does not matter that fraud is rare. That should make it easy to prevent. But Democrats reject simple, common-sense measures like voter ID.
That only raises suspicions about their true motives.
Voters — including Republicans — want the convenience of voting by mail. But they want to trust that their ballot won’t be canceled out by a fraudulent one.
Proposition 39 would require mail-in ballots to be accompanied by a special four-digit PIN, chosen by the voter.
It is a simple solution, on which both sides should agree.
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The post Proposition 39 is the only answer to vote-by-mail chaos appeared first on New York Post.
