By David Robb ——Bio and Archives--February 16, 2024

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How many ghosts live with you? Are you sure? I'm not talking about escapees from the local cemetery. I'm talking about all the people who are registered to vote from your address that you've never met.

I wrote in my previous article how easy it is to create new voter registrations, even for fictional voters. One thing that can make false registrations difficult to detect is the use of an existing address for a legitimate voter. Giving that false registration a different mailing address means that the legitimate resident might never know that a ghost is using their address because all ballots and election materials will be sent to the mailing address. Use of a legitimate address helps hide the ghost from ghost hunters that look for improper addresses.

All that is interesting, but why do ghosts matter? Can they affect the outcome of an election? Actually, someone who knows which registrations are for ghosts can use them to determine the outcome of most elections that have large numbers of vote by mail ballots.

As of now, there are eight states that have all vote by mail elections, including California, Colorado, Nevada, and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia. Those eight plus one state can determine the outcome of most national elections, and also happen to be highly vulnerable to election manipulation. The vulnerability arises from the interactions between dirty voter rolls and how ballots are processed in vote by mail systems.

Imagine for a moment that you are a nefarious person who wants to control the outcome of an election. You know the thousands of ghosts that are present in a particular state or county's voter rolls, either because you put them there, or you were provided with a list of them. You might have an idea of how many ghosts must vote in order to ensure the results you want, just in case you don't want to use all your ghosts at once—after all, you don't want to raise unwanted attention by being greedy.

Since you know the mailing addresses—you provided them, after all—you can pick up lots of ballots at your leisure, or have your agents collect them. You can even have lots of mail go to one address to make things simpler.

With ballots in hand, you then proceed to mark them according to your wishes. If there a lot of them, you could even have a ballot marking party. Put the marked ballots back in their return envelopes, scribble something in the signature area, and send your mule off to drop batches of them in convenient drop boxes. With all the drop box security provisions, your fraudulent ballots will be safe and sound until they can be collected and counted.

You will want to use drop boxes instead of return mail. In most........

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