Election Officials Dismiss Foreign Counterfeit Mail-in Ballots Claims
By Marisa Herman | Tuesday, 02 June 2020 09:47 AM
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/william-barr-elections-mail-in-ballots/2020/06/02/id/970106/
Elections officials told The Washington Post that Attorney General William Barr’s concern that a foreign country could send fake mail-in ballots to U.S. voters is nearly an impossible situation.
Barr brought up the scenario in an interview with the New York Times Magazine published Monday.
“We’ve been talking about how, in terms of foreign influence, there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in,” Barr said. “And it’d be very hard to sort out what’s happening.”
But election officials say that it would be very difficult for another country to create and then mail people fake ballots completely undetected.
The elections chief in Colorado Judd Choate told the newspaper that “there is zero chance” counterfeit ballots could wind up in voter’s mailboxes because of security precautions already in place. Nearly all voters in Colorado vote by mail.
He said ballot envelopes have tally marks on them that are unique to each voter. Voter signatures are then matched to what is on file. A forger would have to match all of the ballot marks and create identical ballots and envelopes as well as forge signatures.
“It’s preposterous to the point of humor,” Choate said of Barr’s claim fake mail-in ballots from another country were possible.
Demand for mail-in ballots are expected to increase with the threat of coronavirus still looming. President Donald Trump is opposed to voting by mail and has claimed it will result in a flawed election.
“There isn’t an election office in this country that doesn’t know how many ballots they’ve mailed out, how many they’ve gotten back in, and who they were sent to,” Tammy Patrick, a former election official with Maricopa County, Ariz., told The Washington Post. “It is absolutely not the case that someone could create a multitude of ballots and in some way infuse them or inject them into the system without detection.”
States that send mail-in ballots use all types of security measures to make sure ballots are valid. Ballots that are not in the right envelope, size or paper are rejected. Election officials said they would notice if they received multiple ballots from one voter.
“While it’s difficult to comment on a hypothetical situation and we can only speak for North Carolina, it’s almost inconceivable that a county board of elections wouldn’t immediately detect ‘counterfeit ballots’ arriving at their offices,” spokesman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections Patrick Gannon said.