Seamy Undersides of Ballot Drop Boxes

Election integrity groups are raising alarm bells on a vestige of the "Covid" year that are clear vectors for vote trafficking operations and should be removed or limited.

Anyone who claims ballot drop boxes don’t incentivize illegal vote trafficking and absentee-ballot coercion among vulnerable populations is not paying attention.

Georgia’s election integrity non-profit, VoterGA, paid very close attention to how the state’s 2020 election was managed.

And unlike other publications, including the Wall Street Journal editorial board, it doesn’t cherry-pick its findings to push a narrative that all was right with the election results in 2020 because it doesn’t like the president who claims it was rigged.

As VoterGA and other groups are finding, the issue in 2020 is whether loose rules on absentee ballots became a vector for illegal votes to be cast, and counted.

Its year-long investigation revealed that chain of custody rules were broken repeatedly throughout the election. It found 107,000 absentee ballots that were included in the presidential election tally with zero chain of custody in a state that certified Joe Biden the winner by an 11,779-vote margin, and where 35,000 non-residents also cast votes. Did they vote absentee, too?

Who collected the ballots from drop boxes? The transfer sheets don't say.

More than 30 investigators could not find transfer sheets with any critical details of how they were handled, if the records existed at all.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger told reporters that all the ballots without chain of custody documentation were legit. But without documentation, how does he know they were the same ballots that citizens dropped in the drop boxes?

VoterGA's co-founder, Garland Favorito, says in his 15 years of election integrity work on behalf of Democrat and Republican candidates in Georgia, he has never seen so many questionable and illegal ballots that were allowed in 2020.

The reasons are legendary at this point. Absentee-ballot rules were changed to weaken the verification of the signatures on the ballots. In addition, Covid-mitigation rules enabled ballot drop boxes, with few, if any, questions or oversight on who decided where they would go, and how the cameras were positioned.

Other states are grappling with the remnants of a one-time, Covid-year rule on drop boxes that progressive groups want to keep in place.

In Wisconsin, Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren ruled that absentee ballot drop boxes that were dispersed about the state in 2020 were not legal under election statute. The Wisconsin Elections Commission basically exceeded its authority when it waved off state law to allow them, the ruling found.

But left-wing groups appealed, claiming that removing them would create too much confusion ahead of the February 15th primary. Another court issued a temporary stay on Judge Bohren’s finding this week.

To summarize: A judge ruled the ballot drop boxes are illegal. But a coalition of non-profit progressive-funded groups, who are pushing hard-left progressive policies, is arguing that ending the illegal practice would create confusion.

Wisconsin registrars allowed voters to exploit the "indefinitely confined" loophole in state law to cast more than 260,000 absentee ballots without a signature in 2020, with the help of illegal drop boxes, before it certified Joe Biden the winner by 20,000 votes.

In Pennsylvania, election integrity group AuditTheVotePA,com has been canvassing the results of the 2020 election and is preparing to release its findings after the state sent out 2.1 million absentee ballots in the 2020 presidential election.

The group says it conducted 256 surveys in Lancaster County and found that 37% of the sample addresses presented some election anomaly. For example, 21.7% of the homes they canvassed were phantom registrations — ineligible voters using someone else’s address.

Vote coercion is among the many reasons that ballot harvesting is illegal in Pennsylvania, as it is in Georgia. Other states limit who can deliver a ballot on a voter's behalf, such as a family member or designated care-giver.

And yet, in Pennsylvania, one nursing home requested 25,000 ballots during the 2020 election, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer report.

Did paid political operatives pick up ballots? Ballot transfer forms would explain who handled the ballots, and whether they were deputized elections officials.

The Republican-led Senate is moving forward with a forensic audit of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania an effort to answer questions that still roil the state’s electorate — much of it related to absentee ballots, dirty voter rolls, and elections officials who also flouted state law on changing signature verification rules.

In the Commonwealth of Virginia, the state assembly is taking up a raft of election reforms, which includes removing or restricting where ballot drop boxes can be placed, among other proposed bills.

VoterGA's Favorito said he is also concerned that Georgia's updated election law, SB 202, does little to nothing to prohibit vote trafficking.

“Some poll workers will allow ballot harvesters to drop hundreds of ballots into drop boxes at polling locations. The law and SEB rules must still be changed further and enforced to ensure election integrity."

The transfer records that VoterGA investigators did get a look at should have raised red flags. Collectors picked up about 35 ballots from a drop box, then about 40 the next day, and then about 30 the following day as part of the daily collection.

The next day, they picked up some 250 ballots.

Did anyone ask questions about a clear outlier of about 250 ballots collected in one day? Did anyone review the security camera videos for those boxes?

Raffensberger has said he outsourced a review of Georgia’s drop box security videos to a company called Mitre Corporation, a high-end defense contracting and “intelligence” firm with a major presence in Northern Virginia.

The review did not discover the vote trafficking operation revealed on the videos .

Raffensberger has confirmed that some 85% of the drop box security videos were deleted, despite federal law requiring all election materials be preserved for 22 months. Using geo-location techniques, election integrity outfit True the Vote tracked the groups going from ballot box to ballot box to dump ballots.

Raffensberger’s office is now investigating the case.

In VoterGA's review, someone picked up 85 ballots from six locations – in 30 minutes. Another ballot-transfer form indicates that the ballots were collected before they installed the boxes.

Democrat politicians and even establishment Republicans would like America to “move on” from the still-expanding list of election fraud that election integrity groups are proving out from the 2020 presidential election.

But the irregularities are providing a wealth of data to inform voting reform measures, even court cases regarding efforts to suppress votes using ineligible ballots. Without proper oversight, drop boxes are a vector for the activity.

As for the DVDs, library books, even some guy's medical records that VoterGA discovered in its review of Georgia’s 2020 drop boxes, it was not clear if those would become part of the official record of the election.

But in many ways, those findings speak for themselves. #