Texas Democratic Party Sees Success In Vote By Mail Program

Austin, TX – As early voting begins, there has been a huge increase in mail-in-ballots thanks to the Texas Democratic Party’s vote by mail program.

In January, we sent more than 116,000 annual applications to eligible voters so they could vote by mail in the Democratic primary, runoff, and the general election. This set the stage for success this November.

We followed-up that successful program with more than 637,000 applications mailed in September.

Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Will Hailer released the following statement:

“We are incredibly encouraged by the numbers we are seeing for vote by mail. For the first time ever, the Texas Democratic Party built and funded a statewide program with more than 600,000 Texans receiving vote by mail applications. “Not only did these voters receive the applications, but candidates, county parties, Battleground Texas, the Texas Democratic Party and dozens of Turnout Texas fellows across the state made phone calls and knocked on doors to encourage voters to return their applications and vote by mail.

We believe the spike in vote by mail ballots can be attributed to this successful program and the hard work of the Democratic infrastructure being built across the state. This program shows that when Democrats work together, we can achieve big things.

The mailing envelopes here are serial-numbered and linked to the voter's name. When the mailer is received at the election office, the name is checked off a list, then the ballot is separated from the mailer and secured in a counting box.

This procedure is intended to prevent duplicate voting.

It does not prevent 10-20 names from being registered at the same address and does nothing to establish whether they are eligible voters (or even real people).

There is a signature block on the mailing envelope for the voter to sign. Supposedly these signatures are verified by the clerks at the election mail receiving centers. In practice this almost never happens as there are too many incoming mailers. They do check off the serial numbers for received mailers and in this county you can see the receipt status online for every voter.

The ballots themselves do not have serial numbers on them and once they are removed from the mailer, they cannot be traced back to the voter.

Anyone can register online and get a mail-in ballot. Late registrants are supposed to include a photocopy of their driver's license or other identification in the mailer when they return their ballots to the counting center.

The safest means to "Fraud the Vote" is by encouraging volunteers to harvest and vote the ballots of relatives and friends who are no longer in the area. This is what Mark Udall's campaign workers have been caught doing. This fraud is almost impossible to detect once the votes have been mailed, unless the volunteers are stupid enough to brag about their activities on Twitter or Facebook.

The most reliable way to "Fraud the Vote" is the classic method to have election clerks introduce extra ballots into the mail-in box.

This can be detected rather easily when the number of votes in a precinct exceeds the number of registered voters. This happened in Colorado (Hinsdale County) during the 2012 elections. A more subtle indicator is when the number of votes in a precinct exceeds the number of ballots issued in that precinct. This happened in several dozen precincts of Denver and Boulder counties in the 2012 election.

This indicator shows up in all Democrat-dominated states and all swing states.

A more expensive method to "Fraud the Vote" is to register tens of thousands of imaginary voters, and seed that list with a few thousand names that will be voted by agents. The primary indicator for this is multiple voters registered at the same address (more than 10), and addresses which are not residences.

This indicator is showing up in all states.

The least reliable method of vote fraud is to gimmick electronic or mechanical voting machines. It can be done in ways that are hard to detect, but it always leaves traces. Those traces lead directly back to the technicians who configure the machines, and to their bosses.

This indicator is obvious in Illinois. Since nothing is ever done about it, and it would be easy to track down the purpetrators, the elections in that state must be considered completely fraudulent.

In Colorado, almost no one actually ever used the electronic voting machines. This makes them unsuitable for fraud, since there weren't enough votes counted on them to make a critical difference.

It does seem like the old ways are the best ways....:(

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