Is It Tunnel Vision?
Tunnel vision is a medical condition whereby the peripheral images are blocked but central vision is alright. It is similar to driving through a tunnel where you see the opening ahead but nothing of the sides of the tunnel as you drive through.
Well,there are people who are on the Internet pushing for absentee voting and many have tunnel vision. They say “I have voted by mail for years and never had a problem, so there must not be one.”
Let me give you an analogy to this.
Let’s say that a guy calls you on the phone on Sunday and says that he wants you to have him invest your life savings. He says that he can accurately predict the future stock market actions. You say “Prove It”. He says that Monday’s market will close down, and he calls you late Monday and you listen to the news and he is in fact right. Then He tells you that Tuesdays market will close up and it does, then Wednesday and Thursday he is correct again. All in advance and all correct and you verified the results by newspaper, TV or even by calling a broker at random. HE WAS RIGHT! He knows his stuff, so you send him your life savings to invest and he disappears with your money. HUH? He was right! What was the scam? You can’t see it because you have tunnel vision.
His call on Sunday went out to 120 people telling them the market would go up (you got that call) and he also called 120 people on Sunday and told them that the market would go down. When the market closed on Monday, that second group knew he was an idiot and he didn’t call them again. However he then told those 120 including yourself that he was right. Tuesday night another half of his called people didn’t get a call, but ou did. So in the end a small number of people were fooled 4 times and he got lots of life savings. From your side it looked like he was right 4 times in a row, but he wasn’t. Thus you never saw the whole picture, you only saw things from your result.
So when you say “But *I* Never had a problem”, you must also say “but how many others did?”.
It is obvious that people who are pushing for, or saying vote by mail is not an issue, apparently cannot do Google searches! I can list here many cases where tens of thousands of ballots have been lost, late or non-existent.
I list here the source so that you can ensure that I didn’t just pick some political website that has an axe to grind. These were found under 2020 voter issues searches.
NPR: An NPR analysis has found that in the primary elections held so far this year, at least 65,000 absentee or mail-in ballots have been rejected because they arrived past the deadline, often through no fault of the voter.
WASHINGTON POST: But voting by mail increases the number of ballots that are rejected — and not counted in the final tally. And ballots from younger, minority and first-time voters are most likely to be thrown out. CNN: In many ways, Georgia’s chaotic experience — which was concentrated in densely populated Fulton and DeKalb counties — was predictable. A high volume of in-person voters and absentee ballots combined with fewer available poll workers and polling locations due to virus fears were all widely anticipated problems that states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania had experienced in their primaries in the weeks prior.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Some Louisville voters received ballots for the June 23 primary election opposite of their party’s registration, the Jefferson County Clerk’s Office confirmed to WDRB News.
NY TIMES: Three tubs of absentee ballots that never reached voters were discovered in a postal center outside Milwaukee. At least 9,000 absentee ballots requested by voters were never sent, and others recorded as sent were never received. Even when voters did return their completed ballots in the mail, thousands were postmarked too late to count — or not at all. The list goes on.
I am not against absentee voting (mail in voting) if it is voluntary. If you want to take a chance of your vote not counting, be my guest. What I AM against is forcing people to vote by mail or using a system that is “not ready for prime time” as they say.