Earlier, by Steve Sailer: WaPo’s Phillip Bump: The Great Replacement Isn’t Great Enough!

The Heartland Institute has put out a startling press release: Heartland/Rasmussen Poll: One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit to Committing at Least One Kind of Voter Fraud During 2020 Election [by Justin Haskins, Christopher Talgo, Donald Kendal, Jack McPherrin, James Taylor, Jim Lakely; December 13, 2023].

When asked, “During the 2020 election, did you fill out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?”, 21% of respondents who said they voted by mail answered “yes.” (Filling out a ballot for someone else is illegal in all states, although many states allow people to assist others with voting.)

Additionally, 17% of mail-in voters said they voted “in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident.” Seventeen percent of mail-in voters also admitted to signing a “ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member.” (Both voting in a state where you are no longer a permanent resident and forging a signature on a ballot or ballot envelope are fraudulent activities that invalidate votes, when caught by election officials.)

Since, as Heartland points out:

…more than 43 percent of 2020 voters cast ballots by mail, the highest percentage in U.S. history.

Heartland promptly came under cyberattack:

The Rasmussen finding obviously puts the integrity of the 2020 election in a very bad light.

So bad that the Washington Post within a few hours had scrambled Philip Bump [Tweet him/Email him], their “National columnist focused largely on the numbers behind politics,” to intercept: Trump is still breaking new ground in ridiculous 2020 denialism, December 12, 2023.

Bump, recently observed on VDARE.com in a piece of off-the-shelf War on Christmas denialism: Anti-Christmas Warriors Rationalize, Minimize, And Deny—But Americans Are Waking Up, deploys, as one would expect, only  smears and quibbling.

Heartland and Rasmussen are denounced as ‘Right-Wing’ and their survey is implied to be too small (Bump does not directly say this because in fact the survey is a normal size for exploratory investigations). Bigger and more expensive surveys are always desirable, if one is serious at all at getting at the truth. But Bump does not call for this.

In fact, in his crazed defense of the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Bump blunders onto a landmine:

…a quarter of the Republicans they interviewed said they also voted by absentee ballot [PC: i.e., far less than Democrats], and their admissions of these federal crimes matched the rates of admission by Democrats…This suggests that a lot of this “illegal” voting presumably resulted in ballots cast for Trump.

But the popular vote, according to Wikipedia, split 51.31%/46.85% Biden/Trump. With 70% (allowing 5% for lesser candidates) of the mail-ins being Biden votes, this suggests that of the total vote 30.1% was mail-in for Biden—30.1/51.32 or 58.7% of his total. Trump’s mail-in total was 11.7% of the total vote or 21.34% of his total.

So even if ballot offenses were equally likely in the two voter groups, the fact that Democrats were close to three times more likely to vote by mail means that on Rasmussen’s numbers some 6% of Biden’s total vote was “tainted” as opposed only 2.34% of Trump’s total, a difference of 3.66%.

As noted above, Biden’s popular vote margin was 4.46%. The Heartland/Rasmussen “tainted” numbers come close to eradicating it.

Bump’s insinuation that cheating cancels itself out is pitifully innumerate.

But of course Presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote. The study makes plain that the impact of mail-in fraudulent activities in contested states could easily have been decisive.

This news is bad enough when considering 2020, but it is extremely alarming thinking about the 2024 election. Election rules have not been changed.

What has changed is our understanding of the legal system. We now know that a Leftist (and/or cowardly) judiciary is absolutely unwilling to prevent Democratic fraud of various kinds. Also that Leftist-controlled law enforcement is eager to savagely repress any protests.

Nothing seems to stand in the way of mail-in voter fraud on an unprecedented scale.

The simple fact is that no remotely politically respectable country allows significant balloting by mail.

In Yes, Virginia (Dare): The 2020 Election WAS Fraudulent—And GA GOP Leadership (Among Others) Are Complicit I observed:

…it is worth considering how other countries approach the chain of custody issue with mail-in ballots.

In general, they approach it by banning mail-in ballots:

Besides the United States, there are 36 member states in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Fifty percent ban absentee voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and an additional 38% require a photo-ID to obtain a [sic] absentee ballot. Fourteen percent of the countries ban absentee mail voting even for those living abroad…

These countries have learned the hard way about what happens when mail-in ballots aren’t secured. They have also discovered how hard it is to detect vote buying when both those buying and selling the votes have an incentive to hide the exchange.

France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in Corsica, where postal ballots were stolen or bought and voters cast multiple votes. Mail-in ballots were used to cast the votes of dead people.

Why do most countries ban mail-in ballots?: They have seen massive vote fraud problems, by John R. Lott Jr., President, Crime Prevention Center, August 3, 2020

In 2005, the issue of mail-in voting was considered by the Commission On Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker: Building Confidence in U.S. Elections, September 2005. Fried notes that the report said:

Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud…

 This is drawn from Joseph N. Fried’s magisterial Debunked?: An auditor reviews the 2020 election―and the lessons learned, which quite simply is essential reading for any patriot having anything to do with the upcoming elections.

In his book, Fried devotes considerable time to demonstrating that the chain of custody for ballots in several states was deficient. He also points out that signature verification in several states (notably Michigan) was close to non-existent.

As it happens, Joseph Fried has recently published on his Substack account, Joe Fried CPA Election Central, a devastating discussion of the role of signatures in modern American elections: Is a Signature enough? Ridiculous!, December 3, 2023:

Prior to the creation of Social Security, there was no national registry of citizens. Signatures were all that we had and all that we needed for voter identification. After all, we almost always voted in person, right in our own neighborhood.

We now have unique ID numbers—courtesy of Social Security and other systems such as driver licensing bureaus and state identification systems. We no longer need to rely on signatures for identification. Furthermore, signatures don’t work in this era of mail-in ballots.

This is not a bi-partisan issue. Republicans generally favor a voter ID requirement, while Democrats do not. Republicans will never achieve the political power they want and deserve until they relentlessly insist on real ID requirements instead of “signature matching.”

Fried goes on to show that the statistical record of signature matching on the basis of numerous studies is abysmal.

He concludes:

The solution is obvious: we need voter ID. Unfortunately, the difficulties are also obvious. Politicians (mostly Democrats) will fight with every insult, smear, threat, and lawsuit in their arsenal to prevent voter ID from becoming a reality in any state they control. To survive, Republicans will have to fight harder.

As matters stand, the 2024 election will be fought while wide open to fraud, on a scale unique in the politically decent world.

Philip Bump is apparently OK with that.

Email Patrick Cleburne.