Get Ready For Another Mail-In Ballot Fiasco

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

Many states are now sending out mail-in ballots for the November election.

Yet at the same time that so many more voters are depending on the mail to cast their ballots, the two leading national organizations of election officials wrote the U.S. Postal Service demanding immediate action to avoid confusion and chaos with mail-in ballots.

“We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service,” wrote the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State. “Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.” According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, mail-in ballots accounted for 43% of the electorate in 2020, a 20-percentage point increase from 2016.

The letter’s list of problems should alarm anyone thinking of voting through the mail instead of going to their polling place to vote in-person. That includes USPS staff nationwide who “are uninformed about USPS policies around election mail,” resulting in “significantly delayed, or otherwise improperly processed” absentee ballots. “Timely postmarked ballots” are being received “10 or more days after postmark,” demonstrating USPS’s “inability to meet their own service delivery deadlines.”

This letter follows a July report from the USPS’s own Inspector General, which warned that its audit of primaries in 13 states found that 2.99% of mail-in ballots reached voters too late and 1.83% were returned to election offices after their legal deadlines. Its list of horror stories included the discovery that “local management at one facility stated they were not aware primary Election Day was that week.”

That means that almost 5% of voters are being disenfranchised, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of votes across the country.

There are reports of other nightmares. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab is “extremely concerned” that in the August primary, 2% of ballots sent by mail were not counted “due to USPS administrative failures.”

“The Pony Express is more efficient at this point” said Schwab.

In July, Utah had a photo-finish Republican congressional primary where the victory margin was 176 votes. But nearly 1,200 mail-in ballots were not counted because they were first sent to a Las Vegas distribution center and not postmarked on time. Most of those ballots were in a county that was carried two-to-one by the candidate who ultimately lost.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation has sued Nevada officials for failure to fix obvious errors on the voter rolls. The organization has found hundreds of questionable voter addresses that include strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. “Nevada’s policy of automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter makes it essential that election officials have accurate voter rolls and are not mailing ballots to addresses where no one lives,” PILF notes.

PILF points out that in 2022, Nevada’s U.S. Senate race was decided by 7,928 votes, which determined party control of that body. The Secretary of State, PILF noted, “published figures showing that 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or ‘bad’ addresses and another 8,036 were rejected upon receipt.” Also: “Another 1.2 million ballots never came back to officials for counting.”

This year, Nevada has another competitive Senate race that could determine the Senate majority.

Nationwide, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reports that of the almost 91 million mailed ballots sent to voters in all states in 2020, only 70 million were returned.

What happened to the others? Some weren’t filled out. But other completed ballots were probably lost by an increasingly inefficient Postal Service. And election officials complained in their letter to the USPS that election mail being “sent to voters” is being returned as “undeliverable” at a “higher than usual rate.” Some voters registered more than once got more than one ballot.

At least 1.1 million went to outdated addresses. Some may have gone to vacant lots and businesses. Some 500,000 were rejected by election officials when they were returned often due to voter errors that could have been corrected by election officials if the voters had cast their ballot in-person.

Registration lists are notoriously chock full of ineligible, duplicate, fictional and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited to commit fraud. Ballots cast by mail can become the object of intimidation and vote-buying schemes.

In 2005, a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker pointed out that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Even the New York Times admitted in 2012 that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.”

Little has changed, In 2019, a congressional race in North Carolina was thrown out over mail-in ballots gathered through illegal vote trafficking. A judge ordered a new election in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, mayor’s race last year after a video appeared to show two women stuffing suspect large numbers of absentee ballots into drop boxes.

In New York, three Rensselaer County officials are on trial this month accused of mail-in ballot fraud. A former GOP elections commissioner who has already pleaded guilty testified that looser post-COVID mail-in procedures make it much easier to commit voter fraud.

Before Election Day, Postal Service officials must address concerns about delays and mishandling of absentee ballots. Sloppy U.S. voting rules on everything from vote trafficking by third parties to lax or nonexistent ID laws in many states make it vital there be election observers watching every aspect of the voting and tabulation process.

And after the weeks of litigation and delays in counting that a tsunami of mail-in ballots will no doubt create, we should rethink the advice of those who disparage in-person voting and assure us “that the ballots are in the mail.”

After all, if you won the lottery, would you mail your ticket in or appear in person to claim your jackpot?

Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

John Fund is National Review’s national-affairs reporter.

Related Topics:#DailyCaller #USElection ElectionFraud HansVonSpakovsky JohnFund Mail-InBallotFiasco VoterRolls

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Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan Ramp Up Pressure On Google Parent Company To Deal With ‘Censorship’

Published on April 18, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Andi Shae Napier

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan are turning their attention to Google over concerns that the tech giant is censoring users and infringing on Americans’ free speech rights.

Google’s parent company Alphabet, which also owns YouTube, appears to be the GOP’s next Big Tech target. Lawmakers seem to be turning their attention to Alphabet after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta ended its controversial fact-checking program in favor of a Community Notes system similar to the one used by Elon Musk’s X.

Cruz recently informed reporters of his and fellow senators’ plans to protect free speech.

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“Stopping online censorship is a major priority for the Commerce Committee,” Cruz said, as reported by Politico. “And we are going to utilize every point of leverage we have to protect free speech online.”

Following his meeting with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai last month, Cruz told the outlet, “Big Tech censorship was the single most important topic.”

Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent subpoenas to Alphabet and other tech giants such as Rumble, TikTok and Apple in February regarding “compliance with foreign censorship laws, regulations, judicial orders, or other government-initiated efforts” with the intent to discover how foreign governments, or the Biden administration, have limited Americans’ access to free speech.

“Throughout the previous Congress, the Committee expressed concern over YouTube’s censorship of conservatives and political speech,” Jordan wrote in a letter to Pichai in March. “To develop effective legislation, such as the possible enactment of new statutory limits on the executive branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users, the Committee must first understand how and to what extent the executive branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”

Jordan subpoenaed tech CEOs in 2023 as well, including Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Tim Cook of Apple and Pichai, among others.

Despite the recent action against the tech giant, the battle stretches back to President Donald Trump’s first administration. Cruz began his investigation of Google in 2019 when he questioned Karan Bhatia, the company’s Vice President for Government Affairs & Public Policy at the time, in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Cruz brought forth a presentation suggesting tech companies, including Google, were straying from free speech and leaning towards censorship.

Even during Congress’ recess, pressure on Google continues to mount as a federal court ruled Thursday that Google’s ad-tech unit violates U.S. antitrust laws and creates an illegal monopoly. This marks the second antitrust ruling against the tech giant as a different court ruled in 2024 that Google abused its dominance of the online search market.

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Daily Caller EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s Broad Ban On Risky Gain-Of-Function Research Nears Completion

Published on April 18, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Emily Kopp

President Donald Trump could sign a sweeping executive order banning gain-of-function research — research that makes viruses more dangerous in the lab — as soon as May 6, according to a source who has worked with the National Security Council on the issue.

The executive order will take a broad strokes approach, banning research amplifying the infectivity or pathogenicity of any virulent and replicable pathogen, according to the source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the anticipated executive action. But significant unresolved issues remain, according to the source, including whether violators will be subject to criminal penalties as bioweaponeers.

The executive order is being steered by Gerald Parker, head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which has been incorporated into the NSC. Parker did not respond to requests for comment.

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In the process of drafting the executive order, Parker has frozen out the federal agencies that have for years championed gain-of-function research and staved off regulation — chiefly Anthony Fauci’s former institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

The latest policy guidance on gain-of-function research, unveiled under the Biden administration in 2024, was previously expected to go into effect May 6. According to a March 25 letter cosigned by the American Society for Microbiology, the Association for Biosafety and Biosecurity International, and Council on Governmental Relations, organizations that conduct pathogen research have not received direction from the NIH on that guidance — suggesting the executive order would supersede the May 6 deadline.

The 2024 guidance altered the scope of experiments subject to more rigorous review, but charged researchers, universities and funding agencies like NIH with its implementation, which critics say disincentivizes reporting. Many scientists say that researchers and NIH should not be the primary entities conducting cost–benefit analyses of pandemic virus studies.

Parker previously served as the head of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), a group of outside experts that advises NIH on biosecurity matters, and in that role recommended that Congress stand up a new government agency to advise on gain-of-function research. Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield has also endorsed moving gain-of-function research decision making out of the NIH to an independent commission.

“Given the well documented lapses in the NIH review process, policymakers should … remove final approval of any gain-of function research grants from NIH,” Redfield said in a February op-ed.

It remains to be seen whether the executive order will articulate carveouts for gain-of-function research without risks of harm such as research on non-replicative pseudoviruses, which can be used to study viral evolution without generating pandemic viruses.

It also remains to be seen whether the executive order will define “gain-of-function research” tightly enough to stand up to legal scrutiny should a violator be charged with a crime.

Risky research on coronaviruses funded by the NIH at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through the U.S. nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance typifies the loopholes in NIH’s existing regulatory framework, some biosecurity experts say.

Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2023 indicated that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a proposal to the Pentagon in 2018 called “DEFUSE” describing gain-of-function experiments on viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 but downplayed to his intended funder the fact that many of the tests would occur in Wuhan, China.

Daszak and EcoHealth were both debarred from federal funding in January 2025 but have faced no criminal charges.

“I don’t know that criminal penalties are necessary. But we do need more sticks in biosafety as well as carrots,” said a biosecurity expert who requested anonymity to avoid retribution from his employer for weighing in on the expected policy. “For instance, biosafety should be a part of tenure review and whether you get funding for future work.”

Some experts say that it is likely that the COVID-19 crisis was a lab-generated pandemic, and that without major policy changes it might not be the last one.

“Gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens caused the COVID-19 pandemic, killing 20 million and costing $25 trillion,” said Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and longtime critic of high-risk virology, to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “If not stopped, gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens likely will cause future lab-generated pandemics.”