Michael Berry

Michael Berry

Michael Berry has drunk homemade moonshine from North Carolina with Robert Earl Keen, met two presidents with the same last name, been cussed at by...Full Bio

 

CBS News Experiment On Mail-In Voting Ends In Disaster

With Democrats across the country pushing mail-in voting over COVID-19 concerns, ‘CBS This Morning’ conducted their own experiment by mailing out mock ballots to fake election offices they set up.

The results “ends in disaster”, as the Republican National Committee put it.

CBS Correspondent Tony Dokoupil reports:

For the experiment, a P.O. box was set up to represent a local election office. A few days after the initial ballots were mailed, 100 more were sent. 
The mock ballots used the same size envelope and same class of mail as real ballots, and even had mock votes folded in to approximate the weight. The biggest difference: real mail-in ballots have a logo that is meant to expedite them. "CBS This Morning" was unable to include those the trial...
Out of the initial batch mailed a week earlier, 97 out of 100 votes had arrived. Three simulated persons, or 3% of voters, were effectively disenfranchised by mail by giving their ballots a week to arrive. In a close election, 3% could be pivotal.
Four days after mailing the second batch of mock ballots, 21% of the votes hadn't arrived. 

Another problem found by Dokoupil was that the post office initially lost the entire stack of initial ballots.It was later discovered.

The Postal Service recommends that "voters should mail their return ballots at least one week prior to the due date."

However, Dokoupil points out that nearly half of all states still allow voters to request ballots less than a week before the election.

More alarming is that when Dokoupil shared the results of the experiment with Philly Commissioner Lisa Deeley, she admitted that the results were actually better than she had expected.

Three-percent of ballots lost and she thinks that’s a good thing.


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