Real Americans and self-respecting individuals everywhere despise queuing with a passion.  Standing in a slowly-moving queue, such as at the DMV, seems to them like a foretaste of Hell.  One might even say that being made to wait in line to vote is a poll tax, and a tax that folks would gladly pay to avoid.  If you think that's harsh, then look at these photos of Americans waiting in line to vote.  When one considers how unpleasant "the several States" have made in-person voting, with lines of voters stretching out into the streets and around polling places, one can see how the electorate might welcome a little relief, even if that relief were as open to fraud as mail-in ballots.

Although Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 (i.e., the Elections Clause) confers on "each State" considerable powers regarding elections, it also says Congress has a say in elections.  Because only citizens can legally vote in elections for federal officials, federal elections should be totally separate from state and local elections.  In other words, when one votes for president and members of Congress, those offices should be the only thing on the ballot.

Two years ago, I wrote that having separate elections for federal officials would be a way to expedite in-person voting.  And that's because with a maximum of only three choices to be made (or even just one if a straight-party option were allowed), voters could vote much more quickly.  You see, the problem with our "mixed" elections, with both federal and non-federal items on the ballot, is that the states and local governments load up the ballot with lots of officials and even initiatives and amendments that force people to take time, hence the hated queues.

Some say the federal elections of 2020 will be the most consequential in our lives.  When one looks at the radical new members of the U.S. House, it's easy to concur with that assessment.  Democrats' current snit concerns the postal system.

The U.S. Postal Service may still be "the nation's second-largest civilian employer" (Walmart's still the largest).  At Postal Facts, we read fact #49: "The Postal Service processes and delivers 472.1 million mail pieces each day."  That would mean that on average, each of America's 330 million residents receives about one and a half pieces of mail per day.

A moment's reflection and some basic math should tell sentient Americans that if all U.S. residents were eligible to vote and were to vote by mail, it would burden the USPS by a total of 660 million additional pieces of mail, well less than what the USPS delivers on two average days.  But not all 330M of us are eligible to vote, and not all the states are engaging in universal mail-in voting.  The actual number of mail-in ballots may rise this year to around 80 million — approximately one extra piece of mail for every fourth American on each of only two days.

Yet Democrats tell us that the ramped up use of mail-in ballots in this year's elections is going to overwhelm the postal system and that Congress needs to appropriate billions of dollars more to the USPS so it won't be swamped with millions of main-in ballots.  (The next thing Democrats will tell us is that to save the election we must "flatten the curve" at the USPS.)

So the extra $25B Democrats want for the postal system is bailout money, especially for the postal workers' pensions and health care; it has nothing to do with some alleged postal crunch due to mail-in voting.  Nonetheless, mail-in ballots do involve a real crunch.

The real crunch of mail-in ballots comes after the states have received them back from the voters, when the states must verify that each ballot they receive back was filled in by the voter to whom it was sent.  But how will they do that?  How can they know that the ballot they're vetting was actually filled in by Mrs. Smith and not by her radicalized college student granddaughter?  Mrs. Smith may have been comatose or on a ventilator fighting for life against the Wuhan virus when her mail-in ballot arrived in the mail.  At the very least, mail-in voters should be required to have their ballots stamped by notaries public.  But that would require them to leave their houses during a pandemic, and we can't have that.

Even if the voter were required to stick his thumbs in an ink well and then press said thumbs on his ballot, it wouldn't mean anything unless election officials verified the prints.  Not all citizens have their prints on file at the FBI.  If vote-counters can't verify that a ballot was used by the person to whom it was sent, then it must be rejected.  But will they reject it?

Mail-in voting is a disaster waiting to happen.  So when the president touched on the possibility of delaying the election, he had a legitimate point.  Mail-in ballots are the new means by which Democrats can stuff ballot boxes.  There is no reason why Americans should accept as legitimate the vote counts in states that use mail-in voting or automatic voter registration or allow foreigners to vote in non-federal elections, as the registrars in the blue states don't check even the most basic thing when registering voters, which is to confirm citizenship.

Even if voter registries were correct and contained only eligible citizens, with mail-in ballots, there'd still be the toil of having to process them — i.e., verifying that the ballots were used by the people they were sent to.  But the registries are notoriously incorrect, so with mail-in ballots, there's still the toil of vote-counters having to determine if the ballot was used by a U.S. citizen.  If vote-counters can't verify the citizenship of the person who used the ballot, it must be rejected.  But will it be?

Some states with mail-in voting haven't abandoned other types of voting, which sets up the possibility of double-voting.  On August 19, The Hill reported that "[New Jersey's] Gov. Phil Murphy (D) issued an executive order requiring every voter in the state receive a mail-in ballot, in addition to being allowed to vote in-person if desired."  The governor seems to want to complicate the work of New Jersey's vote-counters, as he has just made it easier to double-vote.

The election systems we have today aren't any better than the ones we had in the 2000 debacle.  The Federal Election Commission can't be blamed for this, nor will it be any help in fixing it, as the issues are beyond the FEC's mission.  The U.S. Supreme Court may not want to weigh in on the presidential election because the last time it did so, in 2000, the image of the Court was tarnished, and Chief Justice Roberts can't have that.  Perhaps, if there's enough disagreement about the legitimacy of the vote counts, Americans might have to settle for their president being decided by a commission, such as the Electoral Commission that decided the presidential election of 1876.  Or perhaps the election can be decided by another civil war, which we may be overdue for anyway.

Just as Democrats lie about the postal service, they lie about the integrity of mail-in voting.  Democrat vote-counters will want to accept every ballot regardless of signature discrepancies, lack of postmarks, and any other uncertainty.  Republican vote-counters must insist that all requirements be met before accepting any ballot.  Democrats are going to attempt to steal the November elections; that's what they do.  So Republicans, especially in mail-in ballot states, must be prepared to sue and be sued.  Gird your loins, GOP...the Dems are "going postal."

Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.