With the upcoming presidential election, the left is increasingly dispensing with logic and common sense as they push for universal mail-in ballots. It doesn’t take much to see what a disaster this election would become under such an approach. As Attorney General Bill Barr rightly responded when asked if he had evidence that a mail-in ballot election could be rigged, “No, but I have common sense.”
The same logical fallacies that plagued the ridiculous 2+2=4 controversy are now repeated ad nauseam to convince Americans they should adopt universal mail-in ballots to ensure a fair and safe election. In states such as California and Nevada, residents have received mail-in ballots automatically.
Many have gone along with universal mail-in ballots because “experts” endorse them, not necessarily because they have examined the reasoning behind the movement. Arguments from authority, a popular logical fallacy these days, will successfully sway many people who have no interest in looking into the matter. If a so-called fact-checker such as Snopes labels “mostly false” the claim that universal mail-in ballots are vulnerable to fraud, many will agree and assume the issue is closed.
The Left Loves Logical Fallacies
For those who bother to examine the reasoning for universal mail-in ballots, they will find more logical fallacies behind it all. Beyond relying on arguments from authority, many advocates of universal mail-in ballots will primarily mix up the terms to muddy the waters and derail the conversation, conflating absentee voting, early voting, and universal mail-in voting and treating them all alike. As a bonus, they then accuse President Donald Trump of being a hypocrite for applying for a mail-in ballot himself, and pop-star pundits such as Taylor Swift will stridently condemn his refusal to increase funding for a dysfunctional U.S. Postal Service.
To be clear, an absentee ballot requires an application and various forms of authentication from the person making the request. Universal mail-in ballots do not require an application or much authentication from the voter, so no one can say where they go or who is filling them out. Early voting is simply another option for people to vote before the Election Day rush. Each method works differently, so no one should equate the success of one method with the others. Trump successfully mailing his ballot to Florida doesn’t somehow justify sending a random mail-in ballot to a deceased cat.
Another tactic that abuses the same fallacy is to equate one state’s experience with that of every other state. Mail-in voting proponents love pointing to Utah’s universal mail-in ballots — and what conservative American could argue against anything Utah does? Utah, however, has built up the infrastructure to distribute and collect universal mail-in ballots while other states, such as New York and California, have not, which explains the long delays in tallying votes and innumerable ballots being voided.
If those opposing universal mail-in ballots can make it through these bad arguments, they will then run another one: that mail-in voting has shown little actual evidence of fraud. This statement begs the question because few people ever explain how fraud is detected for a mail-in ballot. In most cases, ballots are verified by a simple signature. If election officials detect a difference between the signature on the ballot and another signature presumably on file, they can report an instance of fraud, which a court can then arbitrate.
This means a person counting votes has every reason to accept a signature and no reason to contest it, unless he wants to go through a messy legal process he might not be able to win. If this is the case, there could be many instances of fraud in mail-in voting, but no one would ever really know.
Furthermore, instances of election officials losing ballots or throwing them away, which happens often, does not actually count as fraud. Even if one-fifth of ballots from New Yorkers might never be counted, that doesn’t necessarily translate to massive fraud in universal mail-in ballots, but massive incompetence. This distinction thus allows Trump’s opponents to attack him for using the word “fraud” when “failure” would be a much more accurate term.
Common Sense Argues Against Mail-In Ballots
Using universal mail-in ballots would be like giving a test to a class without bothering to proctor it, count out the number of tests correctly, nor even pass it out to the correct students. No one reports any cheating — not the students, the random kids who have a copy of the test, nor the negligent proctor. When the administrator collects the test, he finds many copies in the trash. In the end, however, everyone involved claims the test was fair and that changing this method of testing would be unwarranted and discriminatory.
That’s why everyone who has considered universal mail-in ballots for any length of time knows it would be disastrous. As Barr said, common sense strongly argues against universal mail-in ballots.
Nonetheless, common sense means little when so many people accept the false dilemma of risking their health to exercise their right to vote. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a woman who said marijuana could be used to treat COVID-19, declared without a hint of irony, “People should not have to choose between their health and their vote, and that’s very important.”
Pelosi is right to say voting is important, but she’s wrong to say it’s a choice between health and voting. It really a choice between accepting reason or succumbing to insanity.