Eric Eggers argues the U.S. election system is vulnerable to massive fraud due to decentralized administration and outdated technology. He cites 100,000 California ballots rejected for signature mismatches and notes that some states accept ballots weeks after Election Day if postmarked on time, creating what he calls third-world election infrastructure compared to countries like Estonia.
voter fraud occurs, and it can occur on a scale the likes of which has already swung an election this century. And when you look at how close the election was in 2016 and how close we expect it to be next month, I think unfortunately you're very right to raise these concerns, Dennis.
If I get it, which I did, my home got a bunch of ballots. If we vote by mail, what is to prevent us from going and voting in person a second time?
Your conscience?
Is that it? If I'm corrupt, I could vote twice?
Well, conceptually, and this is one of the challenges you run into, right? Because America's election, you have to remember a couple things. Number one, it's so decentralized, so it's impossible to make a blanket statement about American elections because for every well-run county or municipality, there's something like Broward County in Florida, which is always in the news for having terrible elections. So it's decentralized that way, but also America remains a third world country when it comes to election technology, right? While countries like Estonia have—
I think that's an insult to the third world.
I mean, there are countries in Eastern Europe, small tiny countries in Eastern Europe like Estonia are using blockchain technology, right? Uh, we're using hanging chads and, you know, unplugging machines to reset them, which happens to be one of the main reasons why you see these long lines. From, you know, to be an elections official, you have to be basically an IT professional. And sadly, many people are not, right? So we have a lot of technology problems that lead to a lot of issues that people want to sort of claim as voter suppression. So, yeah, I mean, American election systems are this rickety old wagon that when this increase of mail-in ballot occurs, it's basically like throwing it on the Autobahn and saying, hey, have fun. And we've sadly already seen massive problems in the primary, right? California rejected 100,000 ballots mostly because of mismatched signatures and also because they weren't accepted past the Election Day. Other states have done the same. So now states have responded to that by saying, all right, well, we'll just extend the deadline by which we'll accept ballots. So we'll accept them, you know, up to a week or 10 days after Election Day, which I don't have to tell you only exacerbates the likelihood of fraud. They say, well, it just has to be postmarked by Election Day. So now the threshold to cast a secure ballot isn't even casting in person, isn't even getting in the mail or having it delivered by Election Day. It's just having access to a postmark that says it was cast by Election Day.
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