I voted by mail for the first time

I voted by mail, I sent in the ballot for the August primaries. I’ve never voted by mail before, but I don’t feel comfortable going to a polling station during the pandemic.

I was always hesitant about voting by mail. I thought there would be too much fraud, but I looked it up, did my research and it seems that there is really no fraud, or nothing to really worry about.

I read on the NPR website:

Amber McReynolds, a former Colorado election official and now the CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, and Charles Stewart, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, recently put the numbers in context in an op-ed in The Hill titled “Let’s put the vote-by-mail ‘fraud’ myth to rest. Over the past 20 years, more than 250 million ballots have been cast by mail nationwide, while there have been just 143 criminal convictions for election fraud related to mail ballots. That averages out to about one case per state every six or seven years, or a fraud rate of 0.00006%.

That is one case per state every six or seven years! I’m sure there are more mistakes made at a polling station by the workers on the premises.

I see many people are against it. I’m not sure why. I guess they don’t want certain votes to count, I doubt it’s the other way around — having votes lost or not counted. Since this was a primary I tried it out. There is a website you go to which lets you know that your vote arrived.

To be honest, our local post office is bad, if my vote doesn’t make it, I would assume it is there ineptness, not the voting process. I would normally snail mail important things from another post office in the area, but this primary vote really was just a party thing where you vote for people in your own party to go up against others in the fall. So I was willing to risk it.

I’m sure I will vote at the actual polls in November. I want to be sure my vote is done on the premises.

Originally published at tomversation.com on July 22, 2020.