Just as the left attempts to sell us on the idea of solid mail-in voting for all future elections in the wake of the coronavirus, out comes the first arrest for mail-in ballot fraud.

According to the Washington Times' Stephen Dinan:

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday lodged mail-fraud charges against a postal worker they say altered absentee ballot requests in last month's primary election.

Thomas Cooper, 47, admitted to changing information on the requests for ballots — including five where he switched the party primary from Democrat to Republican, according to investigators. He told them it was a joke.

The charges were announced the same day that President Trump renewed his attack on mail-in voting, saying it was "asking for fraud."

That would be those same "ballot applications" rather than ballots the press was so eager to scold President Trump for warning about just a few days ago regarding Michigan's governor's insistence on holding an all mail-in ballots election.  As this clown busted above demonstrates, they're so very easy to engineer cheating operations on.  And Trump was right all along about the potential for problems.  He's still tweeting about this, and Twitter is attempting to censor him, but facts are facts: mail-in ballots open up a humongous door to fraud. 

Start with the fact that mail-in elections break the chain of custody that normal in-person voting has.  Does anyone think postal workers are better custodians of voting ballots than trained election workers with observers from two parties watching them from both sides of the fence?  This creep in West Virginia is the tip of the iceberg and quite likely not doing this as a joke, but as part of an organization making a pilot run to find out how easy it would be to achieve this.  Did someone pay him?  Was he just a dupe?  He didn't actually gain anything from his illegal acts, yet he certainly acted in the interests of someone out there.  One hopes the lawmen's investigation unravels a far bigger scheme.

Here's why this idea is so problematic, from an item I wrote about four days ago:

In mail-in voting, the entire chain of custody is broken.

Start with the mail service, when the ballots go out first. Mail people more than anyone know who's living and not living at one address. Guess who delivers the mail? And guess what party they belong to. The fraud could start right there because unlike polling workers, they have no sworn trust to deliver things honestly and worse still, they can't be fired.

A second point of entry is at the mailbox itself, where the delivered mail lies. If a mailbox is abandoned, guess who knows where to go?

A third point is human - whoever it is who may be living at the absentee voter's place. There have been cases in Texas and elsehere of blank ballots being obtained ... for a price. To imagine that couldn't possibly happen in Detroit is ...to use the Detroit phrase, the opposite of shinola.

There's more. The mail-in ballots go back in through the mail. Another point for our union postal workers to show their goodwill ... to someone at least.

Then the ballots go out — on the unscrubbed lists, to whoever sent them in, nobody is going to know whom.

And then the ballots go back, for the count. Again, another opportunity for multiple kinds of fraud - from the who-know-who filled out the ballot, nobody is never going to know, to the postal personnel who touch it, to the elections officials who get it at long last. That's a lot of custody.

And none of this even brings up the issue of illegal immigrants voting. In many states, the numbers are in the tens of thousands.

Another factor is that Democrats want mail-in elections to usher in the practice of ballot-harvesting.  It all looks like shark's fin soup, with everything hunky-dory until an election gets close.  Then, with so many gateways to fraud, you can bet that the fraud will be imported in any cranny where it's needed.  That's a lot of surveillance for lawmen and interested parties to keep an eye on.

In a way, it was good that the bad guy here was an apparent Republican (although we shouldn't be so sure of this until the facts are exposed).  That forces Democrats, who favor this mail-in setup, to defend this creep, because most Republicans are dead-set against this practice.  It's the same as the ballot-harvesting situation in North Carolina, where an election had to be redone because of an apparent Republican consultant's illegal harvesting of Democratic ballots under false pretenses, which were afterward thrown away in order to swing a congressional seat to a Republican.

It's indefensible and very worrisome because it's already happened.  That's why the Democrats and their media allies keep ignoring it.

Bottom line: Ballot fraud from mail-in elections is real, and everyone of good faith who's considering this move as a coronavirus safety measure ought to instead consider the safety of elections.  Trump knew what he was talking about when he tweeted those tweets. 

Image credit: Pixabay public domain.