What if the 2020 election was actually far from the most “safe and secure” in American history, as the mainstream media have relentlessly parroted over the past three years? What if Joe Biden actually lost several of the closely contested battleground states due to widespread mail-in voting fraud? What if Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election?

These questions have been dogging me ever since the 2020 election was called in favor of Joe Biden. However, thanks to a new poll conducted by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports, we may be able to answer these taboo questions with a new sense of confidence.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from the poll: 21 percent of mail-in voters admitted that they filled out a ballot for a friend or family member; 19 percent of mail-in voters admitted that a friend or family member filled out a ballot on their behalf; 17 percent of mail-in voters admitted that they voted in a state where they are no longer a permanent resident; and 17 percent of mail-in voters said they signed a ballot for a friend or family member with or without his or her permission.

Every single one of these instances are illegal and constitute voter fraud. Moreover, these categories are not mutually exclusive, meaning respondents could have engaged in multiple forms of voter fraud.

In the 2020 election, 46 percent of voters cast ballots by mail. However, the proportion of Democrats who voted by mail was significantly higher than Republicans. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, 58 percent of Biden voters voted by mail compared to 32 percent of Trump voters.

If voters for Trump and Biden both cast fraudulent mail-in ballots at roughly the same 20 percent rate, it would mean an outsized number of Biden’s votes were potentially fraudulent simply because Biden received nearly twice the total number of mail-in votes than Trump.

Using simple arithmetic and 2020 election data, we can estimate that Biden received approximately 47 million votes by mail whereas Trump received about 24 million. Now, if we assume that 20 percent of both Trump and Biden mail-in votes were cast fraudulently, it would mean that Biden received nearly 10 million illegal votes and Trump received close to 5 million mail-in votes that should not have counted.

Next, if we extrapolate those numbers across the battleground states, several of which were decided by less than a 20,000-vote margin, it is more than likely that Trump would have carried enough battleground states to win the Electoral College.

Of course, this does not mean that Trump certainly won the 2020 election. But it does mean that Biden’s victory should have an asterisk attached to it, seeing as how the evidence points to the 2020 election being fraught with mail-in voter fraud on both sides.

It also means that those who attacked anyone who questioned the outcome of the 2020 election as an “election denier” should issue a blanket apology.

We must recall that the 2020 election was unlike any other in history because several states bypassed state legislatures and changed election laws due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these changes were designed to eliminate commonsense guardrails like signature verification, which have been in place for decades to ensure that mail-in ballots are as valid as possible.

What’s more, dozens of states, including many battleground states, universally mailed ballots to all registered voters on their voter rolls, even though state voter rolls are notoriously inaccurate. In 2012, the Pew Center on the States analyzed state voter registration rolls and found, “Approximately 24 million -- one of every eight -- voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters. Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.”

Based on this poll’s findings and the countless examples of mail-in voting shenanigans that states purposefully allowed to occur in 2020, it is more than likely that the outcome was skewed in favor of Biden. But that is in the past. It does no good to cry over spilled milk.

However, as the old saying goes: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. To prevent this from happening again, it is imperative that states pass reasonable reforms to ensure that the 2024 election is, indeed, safe and secure. A few examples include cleansing outdated voter registration rolls, requiring signature verification for mail-in ballots, outlawing ballot harvesting, and eliminating no-excuse absentee voting.

Although it is surely necessary for some people to vote by mail, like military personnel deployed overseas, it should be an exception, not the norm.

The first question in the Heartland-Rasmussen poll asked likely voters: “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?” The overwhelming majority (94 percent) said they would vote in person. A miniscule 2 percent said they would not vote at all.

In other words, the vast majority of likely voters are more than willing and able to vote in person. This is how elections have historically been held throughout the world, and how they ought to be held going forward. In 2024, we must make sure that we get to back to basics and encourage people to vote in person, on Election Day, preferably. With our country more divided than I have ever seen, I do not think we can survive another haphazard election like we witnessed in 2020.

Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.

Image: Heartland Instittute