After a complete failure by the United States Postal Service, American voters in Baltimore City, Maryland, just this month received their mail-in votes for the 2020 presidential election.
The event took place in the city of Baltimore, the most populous city in the state when the citizens themselves revealed this delay almost 730 days later.
“On August 6, 2022, I received my ballot for the 2020 general election.” After getting his ballot, Nick Frisone contacted WMAR-2 News. “And then it just never came, so I had to phone the Board of Elections, and then I had to go in person to obtain a replacement,” he said.
Frisone lives in the Highlandtown neighborhood of Baltimore, and many of his neighbors said they also received their ballots just recently.
The USPS acknowledged missing over 20 ballots and failed to deliver them for over two years in a statement, In a statement to WMAR, drafted by USPS spokesman Tom Ouellette says:
“Regarding ballots seen in photographs from a customer’s email, the Postal Service discovered a tray of undelivered mail in a Baltimore facility on Friday, Aug. 5. The tray’s mail was from year 2020 and contained what appeared to be 26 blank ballots mailed from the Baltimore City Board of Election to addresses with a Baltimore ZIP Code. Those mailpieces were delivered Saturday, Aug. 6, We deeply regret the late delivery of these mailpieces. The Postal Service takes these issues very seriously and is working to help avoid issues like this by going over our processes and procedures with all employees ahead of the general elections. The U.S. Postal Service is fully committed to the secure, timely delivery of the nation’s Election Mail. We are in close communication with the Baltimore City Election Board and look forward to a successful election in November.”
Armstead Jones, the director of elections for Baltimore City, claimed that the USPS did not even inform his office of the error. Instead, several of the voters who received their ballots incredibly late told him about it.
“It would’ve been nice if they could’ve contacted us, so the voters wouldn’t have been confused, He was also dumbfounded that an entire tray of ballots could be lost so easily. “Individual pieces can be lost, [but] having a tray lost is a little different story,” Jones said. “It has to be sitting somewhere around somebody and somebody needs to look and see what it is.”
Even in this assertion, Jones unintentionally made a case against mail-in ballots. He made the implication that mail is occasionally lost in bits, and that Americans shouldn’t take this chance with something as important as a ballot. Frisone, on the other hand, claimed that his faith in mail-in voting had been damaged.
“I mean, if there’s another pandemic, I’ll get a hazmat suit and just go in person,” he said.
It is reasonable for voters to obtain a mail-in ballot if they have a good reason to cast the ballot that prevents them from doing so in person. But the idea that any American should be able to vote by mail at any time just because is ludicrous.
Our elections were intended to take place on a single day, and they were almost always intended to take place in person. We must return to this system in order to safeguard the validity of each and every vote.
Sources: Dailywire, Postaltimes, Theblaze
