[Hac-announce] HAC's Own Aaron Goode's Sunday Hartford Courant Letter to the Editor

[kvngough at aol.com]

Hartford Courant, 11/12/2023

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Banning drop boxes is not the answer
On the one hand, it's understandablethat videos coming out of Bridgeport haveput a glaring focus on the absentee ballotdrop boxes adopted across Connecticutduring the COVID pandemic (Oct.22,Page l, "Towns vary on ballot box security").On the other hand, singling outthe drop boxes as a causal factor in voterfraud.is like saying there was no policebrutality until the invention of the smartphone.
No matter how much political partisanspound their fists, correlation is notcausation. Connecticut's 250 drop boxesare overwhelmingly in highly visiblepublic areas with security cameras; theonly reason we know about the allegedfraud in Bridgeport's September primaryis that the ballot harvesters happened touse drop boxes in highly surveilled areas,rather than a postal mailbox, of whichthere are more than 3,000 in Connecticut,many in areas without any surveillance.Not to mention that it would be impossibleto monitor that many locations anyway.
As Walter Olson of the conservativeCato Institute has argued, if improvedsecurity is truly the goal, rather than politicalpoint-scoring, states with significantlevels of voting by mail should be encouragingwider use of ballot drop boxes inplace of conventional post boxes, as thesedrop boxes can "readily be made muchmore secure than postal delivery." Theanswer to illegal ballot harvesting is notbanning drop boxes any more than theanswer.to police brutality is banningsmartphones with cameras.
Aaron Goode, New Haven
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