AMAC Exclusive – By Kathryn Vitale
Ever since 2020, Americans have heard Democrats, including Joe Biden himself, repeat the refrain that mail-in voting through the U.S. postal system is completely “safe and secure.” A New York Times opinion article in May 2020 went even further, claiming that voting by mail “may actually be even more secure than in-person voting.” Democrats and even some misguided Republicans in many states are working to make mass mail-in ballots permanent. Media outlets and left-wing nonprofits constantly accuse anyone critical of mass mail-in voting of trying to suppress vulnerable Americans’ votes. But ironically, the very mail-in voting system Democrats are pushing is, by the admission of the Inspector General of the U.S. Postal Service among others, inherently insecure and could disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters by preventing their ballots from being counted at all.
Skyrocketing mail theft is one big reason why the U.S. postal system is not sufficiently secure to function as America’s election system. The U.S. has experienced a 1,600 percent nationwide increase in checks stolen through mail theft in the past year, according to a recent study. There have been more than 130 cases of mail theft in just one Ohio county this past year, costing victims over $2 million due to stolen checks. In California, 80 people were recently charged for their involvement in a large mail theft operation in which they stole almost $5 million from over 700 victims across the state.
Just a few days ago in Maryland, a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) mail carrier was robbed of her keys—the keys that give access to Americans’ mail—at gunpoint. USPS union leaders in Chicago report that mail carriers are robbed at gunpoint for their keys practically on a daily basis. There have been over 2,000 assaults or robberies of postal workers in the past two years.
This surge in mail theft began during the pandemic in 2020, just as 90 million ballots were mailed through the U.S. Postal Service to voters across America compared to 41 million mail-in ballots sent out during the 2016 election, an increase of 117 percent. From 2016 to 2020, the number of people casting mail-in ballots increased by 109 percent, from approximately 33 million in 2016 to nearly 70 million in 2020. From 2017 to August 2020, complaints of mail theft, vandalism, and delivery problems surged by 600 percent. In August 2020, in the middle of this crime spike and less than three months before the general election, the USPS gutted its police force and prohibited postal police officers from patrolling the streets or responding to postal-related crimes away from postal facilities—a rule that remains in effect today. Even with a practically nonexistent postal police force, in 2020 over 1,600 people were arrested for mail theft.
In the absence of a police force, mail carriers became easy targets for criminals, especially with the postal service’s outrageously unsecured universal key system. Under this system, postal workers are given master “arrow keys” that can open any mailbox in a given zip code area. An August 2020 report by the USPS Inspector General revealed that the USPS has no idea how many arrow keys are in circulation, postal workers do “not adequately report lost, stolen, or broken keys or maintain key inventories,” and the “Postal Service’s management controls over arrow keys were ineffective.” These factors led to an explosion of arrow key thefts starting in 2020.
The problem is only getting worse. Across the nation, many local police departments have begun to warn residents to avoid dropping off checks or mail containing personal information in post office drop boxes.
It is important to state the obvious: if checks and cash can easily be stolen or destroyed, so can ballots. This occurred on numerous occasions during the 2020 election, when many mail-in ballots never made it back to election officials. Instead, they wound up in ditches, trash bins, or on the side of the road. Mail-in ballot drop boxes were vandalized, left open, and even burned to the ground, damaging many ballots. In some instances, bad actors within the USPS attempted to discard or tamper with ballots. A U.S. postal worker from New Jersey pleaded guilty to throwing 99 election ballots in the trash. A postal worker in Louisville, Kentucky, threw away more than 100 general election mail-in ballots. A Miami postal worker was charged with stealing political flyers and a mail-in ballot. Tens of millions of ballots were mailed to voters whether they requested one or not, further increasing the risk of ballots winding up in the wrong hands.
In total, 15 million mail-in ballots that had been sent to voters were never returned to election officials.
Mail carriers also struggle to deliver ballots to election officials on time. In 2020, the USPS warned 46 states and D.C. that it could not guarantee that all mailed ballots would arrive by Election Day. Thousands of ballots never even made it to the voters who requested them. In Wisconsin, 9,000 requested ballots were never delivered. In August 2022, multiple voters in Baltimore just received the mail-in ballots that they had requested two years earlier in 2020.
USPS also failed to properly postmark thousands of ballots, resulting in confusion among election officials regarding whether they should be counted.
In addition to problems with the postal system, shifting away from in-person voting toward mass mail-in voting will disadvantage vulnerable communities. Without election officials present to provide voters with guidance, mailed ballots are significantly more likely to get rejected due to voter errors. Young voters’ ballots are disproportionately likely to be thrown out due to mistakes. By contrast, legitimate in-person votes will almost certainly be counted.
Moreover, Hispanic and Black voters are twice as likely as white voters to choose to vote in person. Of all racial groups, Black Americans are the least likely to choose to vote by mail. States that shift to all-mail-in voting often reduce the number of in person polling places. Even David Becker, the director of a left-wing Zuckerberg-backed nonprofit, expressed concern that quickly switching to mass mail-in voting at the expense of in-person polling places could inadvertently suppress minority turnout.
Democrats claiming to be concerned about voter access must reckon with the fact that each time a mail-in ballot gets lost, stolen, altered, or rejected, it silences a voter’s voice in the electoral process. A secure election system is the necessary first step to protect against disenfranchisement by ensuring that no one’s vote gets lost or fraudulently altered. The logical way to increase voter access is to install more secure in-person polling places—not to promote an inherently unsecure system that compromises a voter’s ballot.
Every American’s vote is far too precious to entrust to a U.S. postal system that has a proven track record of theft, fraud, and human error. Once voters drop their ballots into a blue box, they relinquish control over ballot security to the U.S. Postal System and its mail carriers. Voters must be able to have complete trust that their ballots will not fall into the wrong hands. But the rise in mail theft has demonstrated that it is not possible to have such trust. If it simply isn’t safe to put sensitive personal information, checks, or cash in the mail, then it isn’t possible to trust the mail system with millions of mail-in ballots. The inescapable conclusion is that the U.S. postal system should not serve as this country’s election system and that voting in person with paper ballots remains the most secure voting method. To best ensure that every legal vote is counted, American elections must be conducted in person – not by mail.