Why alleged New Jersey voting fraud scheme would likely fail in Washington
Sep 5, 2020, 7:28 AM

An elections worker loads unopened ballots into a machine for sorting at the King County Elections headquarters on August 4, 2020. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
(Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
detailed a decades-long voting fraud scheme committed by an anonymous Democratic operative in New Jersey. Would a similar scheme work in Washington? Secretary of State Kim Wyman weighed in on Seattle’s Morning News.
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In the operative’s scheme, he would have people working for him offer to mail people’s ballots for them, steam ballot envelopes open, and then reseal them with fake ballots. In Washington, there are layers of security that would likely make that impossible.
“County election officials this year, in response to COVID-19, have moved to a self-sealing envelope, and those have a little different adhesive to them,” Wyman detailed. “I’m not sure you could steam those open in the way he talked about.”
Replacing official ballots with falsified ones would also prove difficult in Washington with “hundreds of different types of ballot styles,” each with a unique bar code depending on your county and voting district.
“There’s going to be things that are going to flag it up to election officials, and I think we would be able to detect it,” Wyman said.
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Wyman also questioned other parts of the Post’s story, including a claim that the anonymous operative had people inside the U.S. Postal Service who frequently helped him “lose” boxes of mail-in ballots.
“I think of all of the governmental agencies, the USPS is probably the most regulated,” she noted. “They have a lot of technology to expedite processing, and when ballots enter the mail stream, they are captured by that technology. The idea that they could just suddenly throw away bunches of them and have it go unnoticed, I think, is probably false on its face.”
As for why someone might lie about that, Wyman has her suspicions.
“I think that this is more just (about putting) fear in voters’ minds and discrediting the process,” she opined.