The media have been falling all over themselves to "report" that mail-in voter fraud is "rare," in line with the wishes of their Democratic Party masters.

Here's just one example under the feature heading "explainer" from Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — With the number of Americans voting by mail on Nov. 3 expected to nearly double due to COVID-19, election experts see little reason to expect an increase in ballot fraud, despite President Donald Trump's repeated claims.

...and...

 As with other forms of voting, documented cases of mail-ballot fraud are extremely rare. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which has warned of the risks of mail voting, found 14 cases of attempted mail fraud out of roughly 15.5 million ballots cast in Oregon since that state started conducting elections by mail in 1998.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Heritage in fact documented 1,296 cases of electoral fraud, and those are the proven ones.  How many go uncaught is another issue, and how many involve cases premised on mass mail-in voting, such as ballot-harvesting fraud, can only raise the number.  Reuters's "14" number is disingenuous, to say the least.  Here's the other thing: mass mail-in voting wasn't common in the past, which naturally lowers the number.  Now that it is, prepare for Reuters to be "surprised" if it was just marginally honest.

This brings us to Paterson, New Jersey, where mail-in voting fraud has forced a judge to declare cause for a new election.

According to the New York Post:

A judge this week ordered a re-vote on Nov. 3 for the 3rd Ward race, where "winner" Alex Mendez faces state fraud charges — as do 1st Ward Councilman Michael Jackson and two workers for 2nd Ward candidate Shahin Khalique's campaign. (Khalique's race ended in a tie and will also be re-voted in November.)

Weeks after the May election, state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal charged the four with fraud in casting mail-in votes, unauthorized possession of ballots, tampering with public records and falsifying or tampering with records, and hit Mendez with added charges including election fraud. (All four deny any wrongdoing.)

Most of it revolved around improper "vote harvesting" — where an intermediary turns in your ballot for you.

And the charges don't even cover the other signs of trouble — the hundreds of Paterson ballots found scattered across other Jersey towns or the 800 ballots tossed by the Passaic County Board of Elections over various improprieties. (In some parts of the Garden State, a full quarter of ballots got disqualified.)

Mail-in voting has barely become a thing yet, and look at how much evidence there is of fraud.  Naturally, it takes place in blue cities, but most anyone can do it, and it has happened in red states, such as North Carolina, too.  It makes sense that there is fraud because elections these days can be close, unscrupulous candidates can be determined to win, there's an emerging new tradition from the left of not accepting election results, and now the incentive is there, like a banker's bag left out in the sun, to use the helpful conditions of mail-in voting to cook ever more creative ways of engaging in voter fraud.

The press is ignoring what is going on in Paterson, but the lesson for the rest of us is that the risk is growing.  Leftists have always stolen elections in blue cities such as Chicago — it's a tradition of theirs — and the Democrats' new enthusiasm for mail-in ballots suggests they'd like to export the Chicago Way to the rest of the country, creating permanent blue cities and states as rigidly unaccountable and un-vote-out-able as Mexico's famously venal and corrupt PRI until the 1990s.  Most nations prohibit mail-in balloting for just this reason.

Now that mail-in balloting is seen as beneficial to Democrats, it's taken off, with Democrats justifying it on COVID "safety" concerns.

Paterson is warning how disgusting it can get.  If it becomes widespread, we will be living in a tyranny.  Democrats may like that, given the power it gives them, but the rest of us should be on high, high alert, given the evidence of our eyes.   

Image credit: Picryl, public domain.