How many elections has it swayed? Would Bush-Gore 2000 have even been close had it not existed? We don’t know. What we do know is that a huge ballot-harvesting operation in Orlando, Florida, has just been busted, with a Democrat blowing the whistle on it. The allegations are staggering, too:
Paid Democratic operatives would manipulate Orlando residents into requesting mail-in ballots; instruct the people on how to fill them out; and, in cases where the voters support the “wrong” candidates, illegally alter or discard the ballots.
The Washington Times reported on the story last week:
Florida’s newly created Office of Election Crimes and Security is requesting a criminal investigation into charges of ballot harvesting in Orlando, a Democratic stronghold in the critical swing state.
Cynthia Harris, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for District 6 commissioner in Orange County, which includes Orlando, provided a sworn complaint to the election crimes office, alleging left-leaning organizations have been perpetrating a scheme to encourage residents in black neighborhoods to apply for mail-in ballots and to fill out those ballots, which she said have been collected by paid canvassers, and sometimes altered, all in violation of state law.
In an interview with The Washington Times, Ms. Harris said she has video evidence of paid ballot harvesters operating in Orlando neighborhoods in both 2014 and 2017, and that the scheme has been going on for decades, continuing through the 2020 election and the 2022 primary.
It’s the kind of thing other Democrats swear never happens, claiming vote fraud is just a rightist meme, not a leftist theme. But the facts tell a different story. As Just the News writes (any errors in original):
“Ballot brokers typically work up to a year in advance,” [Harris] stated. “Ballot brokers visit individuals in their residences and assists the individual with filling out a request for a mail-in ballot. After the mail-in ballot arrives, the voter is instructed to wait for the ballot broker returns to the individuals residence. They are asked to not seal the certificate envelope.”
“In rare circumstances, if the voter has filled out the ballot and sealed the envelope certificate, the ballot broker will take the ballot and then steam open the sealed envelope,” the affidavit added. “The ballot broker will either correct any votes, if necessary, that were not voted according to their wishes or just throw them out.”
Harris related a bit more of her story in the interview below.
Commentator Monica Showalter adds, “So this has been going on for years in the Orlando area and, up until now, nobody did anything about it. It’s coercive, illegal, anti-democratic, widespread, and slimy.”
Widespread it is. Just the News cites a Democratic Arizona mayor who pleaded guilty to ballot-harvesting charges and a Wisconsin investigation that exposed a harvesting operation in Racine. Operations have also been revealed in San Antonio, Texas; Georgia, and Minnesota. The reality:
Anytime there are vulnerable people (e.g., in nursing homes) or those not very conversant with politics who often wouldn’t vote (e.g., in inner cities), there may be ballot-harvesting operations targeting them.
What’s not widespread is media coverage of the crime or even of the convictions of those committing it. This is because the mainstream media mainly comprise staunchly partisan Democrats, and exposing the problem would both hurt their party and make it more difficult for it to continue to thus steal votes.
Strikingly, ballot harvesting is now legal in California, which helps explain why it has become a one-party Democratic state. Making note of California’s standard, a 2020 GOP report added perspective, writing that the “unlimited ballot harvesting process in use throughout California should be differentiated from what is known as absentee or mail-in voting in other states. Absentee and mail-in voting began as a means for a resident of a state, who would be absent on Election Day or who could not physically cast a ballot at a polling location, to cast their vote ahead of time — with some states requiring an ‘excuse’ to qualify. This is a reasonable means to increase voter participation [sic], unfortunately California has removed any means by which to reasonably supervise this process — leading to what we now know as ballot harvesting.”
The report then mentions the “ballot brokers” and how they “identify specific locations, such as large apartment complexes or nursing homes, where voters have traditionally voted for their party and build relationships with the residents.” These operatives “encourage, and even assist, these unsuspecting voters in requesting a mail[-]in ballot; weeks later when the ballot arrives in the mail the same ballot brokers are there to assist the voter in filling out and delivering their ballot,” the report continues. This perverts the system and eliminates the “‘secret ballot,’ a long-held essential principle of American elections intended to protect voters.”
“These very scenarios are what anti-electioneering laws at polling locations are meant to protect against,” the report further states. “A voter cannot wear a campaign button to a polling location, but a political operative can collect your ballot in your living room?”
“These ballot brokers are the new Tammany Hall ward bosses, controlling the votes of their harvested area,” the reports adds. “Brokers are often added to campaign payrolls based purely on the number of ballots they promise to harvest.”
This is precisely why mail-in voting has been illegal in France since 1975: It’s the type of balloting most susceptible to fraud. But, of course, this isn’t a bug but a feature to our leftists: They push mail-in voting because they know it facilitates their vote theft.
That fact is that our “elections are full of holes and [are] becoming a laughingstock to the third world, which knows all these tricks well,” writes Showalter. “Ballot harvesting, for example, was pioneered by the PRI party [Institutional Revolutionary Party] in Mexico, which held power for 70 years as a one-party state, having maneuvered itself into this position precisely with this practice.”
“It was not for nothing that writer Mario Vargas Llosa called this setup ‘the perfect dictatorship,’” Showalter continues. “Democrats, many of them with roots in the Mexican illegal alien community in California, brought this practice with them and adapted it to California’s elections — [to] the point that real Mexican nationals are appalled. One told me that California’s politics resemble Mexico’s 40 years ago, Mexico having instituted more safeguards to prevent this rigging from happening.”
Mail-in voting should probably be limited to military members and virtually no one else. Creating a system ripe for fraud in the name of helping a few people vote who otherwise wouldn’t be able to (e.g., those leaving on a trip) is a terrible trade-off. It undermines faith in our system, creates cynicism and suspicion, and thus helps rot the soul of our nation.
To learn more about how to restore election integrity, click here.
