From WSJopinion: Vote in person. It’s not more dangerous than going to the grocery store and will help reduce the scope for November-December chaos, writes Holman Jenkins.
Time is required to exchange pieces of paper through the mail, as Congress understood in the Credit Card Act of 2009. It set a 21-day grace period before interest accrues to your account. It set clear rules for when your payment is complete: when received, not when postmarked. Even so, one voting-like risk doesn’t exist: None of us is ever likely to be victimized by a stranger paying off our credit-card bill in our name.
Alas, the likelihood of millions of November ballots becoming disputed only begins with the possibility of a late or missing postmark. Pressies amuse themselves by inventing behavior by Donald Trump as the source of every problem, but any election, involving any two candidates, would descend into legal chaos if the margin is significantly less than the number of rejected ballots .
Mail-in ballots raise an obvious chain-of-custody challenge—how do we know who truly voted?—against which states have erected various barriers involving signature-matching and witnesses. Now these are being rewritten on the fly. Judges will second-guess rejected ballots. They will second-guess unrejected ballots and may even demand an accounting for unsolicited ballot forms sent out but never returned by a voter.
In a normal election, 0.01% of in-person ballots are disqualified, and about 100 times as many—or 1%—of mail-in ballots. In the Wisconsin Democratic primary in April, 2.5% of ballots were disallowed, the equivalent of three times Donald Trump’s victory margin in 2016. In the last presidential race, 134,000 Wisconsinites voted by mail. This fall, it’s expected to be 1.8 million.
When the oregano hits the fan, our only avenue is to fall back on the letter of the law. When America heard Hillary Clinton say Joe Biden should “not concede under any circumstances,” many of us mentally reserved an unspoken clause on Mrs. Clinton’s behalf: “unless Donald Trump has clearly won.” We may have given her too much credit. If Americans take to the streets amid weeks of legal wrangling, none can be entirely confident of an orderly, constitutional outcome.
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