Letter: Claiming widespread election fraud is wrong | Opinion | normantranscript.com – Norman Transcript

Claiming widespread election fraud is wrong

A recent report in OKPolicy from the SWLedger says there were 49 cases of voter fraud among the 1,560,699 votes cast in Oklahoma in the presidential election last year (Feb 25, 2021). That amounts to a minuscule percentage, some 0.0031%.

And yet our legislature, like 42 other Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country, wants to restrict voting in various ways.

Most of the voter fraud cases involved double voting, where a voter submitted an absentee ballot and then tried to vote in person too — usually from forgetfulness.

As a first-time poll worker at my home precinct, I witnessed none of this. In fact, in spite of the large turnout, it was a hectic but pleasant day. The poll team was bipartisan, and we all got along well. I was the one who handed out the ballots after the identities were checked. Our chief dealt with problem ballots, and a volunteer manned the machine that tallied the paper ballots.

The doubtful instances were only two. An older voter got his ballot, sat down at a table in the church community hall where we were set up and promptly fell asleep. We debated whether to wake him. But we decided to wait, and in a while he woke up, filled in his ballot, cast it and left.

Another instance involved a young woman who showed up saying she had always voted at our precinct. But she had moved to a new address and gotten married, changing her name. She had a new identity card reflecting her new name and address, and she had destroyed her old identity card.

So we didn’t know what to do, and we kicked it up to the county officials. If Oklahoma had had same day registration, she could have registered then.

Was any of this fraud? I saw none.

Politicians worry about mail-in voting. Several people came in who had requested and received mail-in ballots. They had to sign statements that they had not voted with those ballots and that the ones they were casting in person should count. We did not check this, but I’m sure county officials did.

Voting appears to be safe and reliable, and of course in Oklahoma we have a paper trail if a recount is called for. We may be disappointed in election outcomes, but it is wrong to claim there was widespread fraud.

But there was widespread access. I gave out 510 ballots during our 12-hour day, more than any of our veteran workers could remember in previous elections.

I did not know the precinct vote result until I read about it in the newspaper the next morning. If I had wanted to cheat somehow, say, by giving my friends in the line more than one ballot, my colleagues would have noticed and stopped me.

I felt proud to be an American that day, and I believe we all should, no matter what those who did not win may say.

Dan Snell

Norman

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