Massachusetts Will Allow Votes of Dead People To Count in 2020 Election
Dead people can officially vote in the November election in Massachusetts, officials in the state have announced.
No, this isn’t a Babylon Bee article, and this isn’t the twilight zone.
This is the most consequential election in modern American history, and this is indeed real news.
WBZ-TV reported that Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin, a Democrat, announced on Monday a change to a previous election rule that would reject the ballot of any person who was discovered to have passed away before an election day after voting early.
Now, in a change that is “necessary because of the coronavirus pandemic,” per WBZ-TV, such votes will be counted this year.
This means that if someone votes early now ahead of the November election, but dies before Election Day, their vote will be counted.
Gee, what could go wrong?
This is problematic for so many reasons beyond the obvious, which is whether or not the deceased should have their ballots counted with regard to an election that will affect a future they, sadly, will miss out on.
But what if a voter dies today and their ballot is left on the dinner table or in the mailbox for someone else to fill out and send in?
Even with a certificate of death proving the person died four weeks before the election, the vote could be accepted.
Massachusetts previously required voters who voted by mail to apply for an absentee ballot and to offer a reasonable reason as to why they would be prevented from in-person voting.
As of this year, any Massachusetts resident registered to vote by July of this year was automatically sent an application for a mail-in ballot, Fox News reported.
Now there are ballots floating around in Massachusetts that could, in all likelihood, be in the wrong hands right now, and could be harvested and sent in without the knowledge of a person who has since died or is on their death bed.
The decision is absurd, but it is also more evidence that the party that has pounded its chest for four years about election security suddenly doesn’t care about secure elections.
Even without later proof of malfeasance, the notion that something could be awry with the state’s ballots only casts more doubt on the election’s legitimacy.
A growing notion that the coming election will be anything but fair didn’t need any assistance, as we’ve already seen hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballot irregularities across the country.
With countless examples of mail-in ballot issues, Massachusetts officials went ahead and decided that they would add to the vote-by-mail fiasco.
Galvin was on Twitter earlier this week reminding voters their ballots were on the way:
If you’ve already applied for a Vote by Mail ballot, you’ll soon see the date your ballot was mailed to you at https://t.co/jBrByhxViJ.
Nearly all ballots are expected to be in the mail this week. Now is a good time to apply, if you haven’t already.https://t.co/B4iSkjiTeu https://t.co/vk8p06d9zq
— Mass. Elections (@VotingInMass) October 5, 2020
Galvin left the mildly important detail about dead voters out of his tweet.
“To be clear, these are people who are alive and competent when they voted, but they may have died unexpectedly after they voted,” Galvin said of the decision to allow dead people’s votes to count, per WBZ-TV.
“In past times, if the local officials knew they were dead – had died – even though they had legally voted when they cast the ballot, they would have discarded the ballot, not counted it.”
Added the Massachusetts Secretary of State, “If somebody voted at 8 o’clock in the morning in person and then two hours later died, their ballot being in the box, it would have been counted. If somebody voted on an absentee ballot the day, or two days, before the election and died on Election Day and there’s no chance the material determined that they had died, they would always be counted. So that’s not new. What this did is (the legislation) took it out further.”
“It’s not a significant number of ballots,” he concluded.
The optics on this are horrendous.
On top of that, mail-in ballots in the state, even from those who have died, will be counted for 20 additional days past the Nov. 3 election.
Massachusetts isn’t in play for President Donald Trump or the GOP, so it’s surprising the state’s elected officials would take this kind of measure to further debase the integrity of the election.
Still, this is ridiculous.
Thank the Lord above for blessing the country’s founders with the foresight, intelligence and intuition to institute the Electoral College.
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