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Robert Romano
Where are the envelopes?
That is the question every single Republican Party lawyer contesting the results of absentee mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona ought to be asking in court to determine how many ballots were submitted after legal Election Day deadlines or were otherwise potentially illegitimate because the signatures or addresses didn’t match – or if the voter was even on the voter rolls.
Without those envelopes, which have now been separated without opportunities by GOP poll watchers to examine, it may be impossible to determine whether or not these were properly submitted and counted.
In Pennsylvania, for example, the voter’s signature was supposed to go on the envelope containing the ballot and does not appear on the ballot itself. According to VotesPA. com, voters must “[c]omplete, sign and date the voter’s declaration on the outside of the outer return envelope. If you do not sign the outer return envelope, your ballot will not be counted.”
With the ballots separated from the envelopes, even if courts were to order recounts in all these states, it may be impossible to trace them back to the voters on file and determine if that person was eligible or not, and if it was submitted in time.
The problem in Pennsylvania is that poll watchers were not given the opportunity to challenge ballots, according to President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
“Even when a court order was obtained to allow the Republican inspectors to get six feet closer, they moved the people counting the ballots six further feet away,” Giuliani said. “It’s really simple. If you have nothing to hide with these mail-in ballots, you allow inspection.”
Giuliani added: “Now, you’re also going to find that way across on the other side of the state, there was a similar situation in Pittsburgh, involving 300,000 ballots that were un-inspected, un-reviewed, not observed by a single Republican. Not a single one. There’s got to be a pattern. As a friend of mine says, I don’t believe in conspiracies, but I also don’t believe in coincidences. It’s kind of funny that all Republicans were rejected here, and all Republicans were rejected in Pittsburgh, and it amounts to about, just about the 700,000 votes that President Trump was ahead by.”
And, of course, the Republicans will want to challenge these uninspected ballots, but now it might be impossible. Without the envelopes tied to the ballots being available in any recount, particularly in Pennsylvania, questions about the legality of these ballots could linger throughout history. And the biggest loser in that process will be Joe Biden, who has the greatest interest in ensuring that if he won, it was a verifiable outcome. The legitimacy of any Biden victory depends on it.
The potential problem of missing envelopes ranges across the swing states. In Georgia, where a recount has been ordered, “Copies of any IDs must be placed in the outer envelope …. Once the absentee ballot is received by the county office, the registrar will compare your signature on your absentee ballot oath envelope to your signature on your voter registration card and your application for absentee ballots to verify your signature. If the signature on the absentee ballot oath envelope is missing or does not match the previous signatures, your county will contact you and provide a document whereby you can provide a signature and ID to verify your ballot.” And, the political parties are entitled to monitors under state law.
Similarly, in Michigan, absentee ballots must be signed on the envelope and match the signature on file to be counted, according to the Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s website. And under state law, political party monitors must be present at all times, and the absentee ballots must be “accessible to challengers.”
But what if the monitors were not allowed to inspect ballots and challenge them? Then the counting was illegal under state law.
The ballots in our democratic republic are sacred, and when they are submitted via absentee, the political parties are entitled to challenge each one of them to determine that the voter was properly registered and living in the state. It is standard procedure, and yet, in major cities run by Democrats in critical battleground states, Republican poll watchers were prevented from doing their jobs.
Now the only way to determine if these ballots were legitimate will be with recounts that should be promptly ordered by state courts, or if they refuse, the U.S. Supreme Court. And if the ballots were permanently separated from their envelopes denoting the voter, and/or those envelopes were destroyed, it may be impossible to determine if every vote that was counted in the 2020 election was legally cast.
At that stage, the only possible remedy might be to invalidate the count.
Even if Biden wins, then finds he lacks the legitimacy to govern, he will have no one to blame but the local Democratic parties that botched the counting of absentee ballots by blocking legitimate Republican poll watchers in clear violation of state laws.
ROBERT ROMANO is the vice president of public policy at Americans for Limited Government, based in Fairfax, Virginia.