Reno Gazette Journal August 9, 2020
Last week, in a special session of the Nevada Legislature, the Democrats, by a straight party line vote, passed a legislation that will require a mostly mail-in vote for the November General election. While Nevadans have historically had the opportunity to request an absentee ballot by mail, this bill will require that ballots be mailed to all voters, including inactive voters who haven’t voted in a long time and no longer live at that address, without the voter having to request it. It also provides someone other than the voter to fill out the ballot using a process called “ballot harvesting”.
In passing this legislation, Democrats have used COVID as an excuse to do what they have always wanted to do: to go for an all-mail ballot. They have used a pandemic, where nearly a thousand Nevadans have lost their lives, to further their long-standing partisan political goal. In just a couple of decades, we have gone from election day in-person only voting to early voting for two weeks, to not having to show up at all, to not having to even request a ballot, to having someone else fill out the ballot.
The far left, which argued that large scale demonstrations (with thousands of people inches away from each other wearing no masks) are too important a civil rights issue to be stopped by the pandemic, suddenly do not find voting to be important enough to stand in line one at a time, 6-feet apart, with a mask on, to exercise the right that many Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve.
Democrat Senator Spearman claimed that as a descendent of slaves, she backed the bill “because voting is sacred to me.” Senator, if it is so sacred to you, you should show up on election day and vote. If you need a ballot to be mailed to you without you even having to lift a finger, obviously it is not as sacred as you claim it is. Let’s spare everyone the victim claims.
The Governor’s excuse for the mostly mail-in ballot is that he wants to safeguard the health of voters. If social distancing, mask wearing and washing hands works like the Governor claims, where is the risk? How does sending in a request to the Registrar’s office for an absentee ballot compromise anyone’s health, pandemic or not? All we ask is for people to make a request to their Registrar’s office for an absentee ballot like we have for decades past. Is that too much to ask?
As for the issues with mail-in balloting, New York is still counting votes from its June primary. Here in Nevada, Clark county registrar had trailers filled with returned ballots. If returned ballots are bad, fraudulent ballots are much worse. What do you think people do with their ballots? While some guard it like the greenback, I know many others who treat it like junk mail. Apartment complexes where people toss junk mail into the bin next to their mailboxes would be perfect places for political operatives to engage in malfeasance.
One final point: As you have probably read in the news reports, nearly 200,000 fraudulent unemployment claims have been filed in the state of Nevada recently. The state sent out checks to people who never even filed for unemployment. Do we really believe a government that cannot manage a few hundred unemployment checks with real money associated with it can manage over a million paper ballots?