A local television station conducted an experiment with vote-by-mail and it exposed the shortcomings of the system.
WRDW in Philadelphia sent 100 “mock ballots” from across the city to a P.O. box set up specifically for the test.
A few days later, reporter Tony Dokoupil sent 100 more. He sought to mimic the size and weight of ballot envelopes to ensure the most accurate results.
A week later, Dokoupil went to the post office to pick up the delivered ballots at the PO Box he had created for them.
At first, a worker could not find his mail. When he sought to confirm the answer, he was dismissed.
“Alright then, have a good day,” he was told curtly.
It wasn’t until he spoke to a manager and explained the experiment that he finally found what he was looking for.
“They had them somewhere else,” he was told from behind the protective glass.
Dokoupil tabulated the results:
- 21 percent of the votes hadn’t been delivered within the same city after four days.
- Some mailed a week prior were also missing.
At the end of the experiment, only 97 percent of the ballots arrived. Three percent were missing, leading Dokoupil to declare those mock voters were “disenfranchised by mail.”
The reporter then hit the streets and couldn’t find a resident who would say a kind thing about the mail service.
“I just don’t trust the mail,” one woman said.
Another woman said she wanted to actually see her vote submitted “to see that it actually counts.”
President Trump shared the news story on Twitter on Wednesday.
That was preceded by a tweet slamming mail-in voting in New York.
“New York Mail-In voting is in a disastrous state of condition. Votes from many weeks ago are missing – a total mess,” Trump wrote.
“They have no idea what is going on. Rigged Election. I told you so. Same thing would happen, but on massive scale, with USA. Fake News refuses to report!”
In April, the Public Interest Legal Foundation estimated 28 million mail ballots “went missing” over the last decade.
“Putting the election in the hands of the United States Postal Service would be a catastrophe. Over the recent decade, there were 28 million missing and misdirected ballots,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said.
“These represent 28 million opportunities for someone to cheat. Absentee ballot fraud is the most common, the most expensive, to investigate, and can never be reversed after an election. The status quo was already bad for mail balloting. The proposed emergency fix is worse.”
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on Saturdays. Listen to segments on YouTube. Follow him on Twitter, like him on Facebook, and follow him on Parler.