As former U.S. President George W. Bush once said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice — you can’t get fooled again.”
That questionable aphorism will be put to the test this election season as states continue to look for excuses to preserve no-excuse mail-in ballots that even U.S. authorities quietly acknowledged were less secure than in-person elections requiring voter identification.
Overseas in China, one year prior to the 2020 elections, a worldwide viral pandemic originated. The SARS-CoV-2 virus — now known to have almost certainly originated in a Wuhan laboratory — caught fire; the Covid-19 pandemic would go on to disrupt the global economy and upend national elections, including the federal elections in the United States.
Now there are reports arising that the Covid pandemic is flaring up again, this time in the Chinese capital of Beijing.
As reported in the Epoch Times, known for its opposition to the Communist Chinese Party, Beijing is seeing a major uptick in Covid cases.
“Health officials in Beijing have admitted that the COVID-19 epidemic is once again on the rise after the Chinese New Year holiday (Feb. 9–17),” the Epoch Times reported. “Chinese residents in Beijing and East China reported a spike in infections and more deaths during the holiday week.”
“The Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Feb. 22, that respiratory infectious diseases in Beijing are currently caused by both influenza and COVID-19,” the report continued. “Influenza has shown a slight downward trend recently, while COVID-19 continues to rise. The COVID-19 positivity rate in hospitals in the past week was 21.1 percent, and the JN.1 variant is the main circulating strain causing infections.”
The report added, “On Feb. 1, before the Chinese New Year, the COVID-19 positivity rate reported by the Beijing CDC was 6.4 percent. In about two weeks, it jumped to the higher rate. Chinese netizens posted on social media: ‘The outbreak is coming’.”
A Beijing resident told The Epoch Times that after the Chinese New Year “the outbreak is not diminishing, but has become more severe.” The source added he was told by a medical worker that frontline nurses and doctors “are not told about the real information at all [by the authorities], they are kept in the dark too.”
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, as of December 20, 2023, there are twenty-eight states that offer “no-excuse” absentee voting, which means that “any voter can request and cast an absentee/mail ballot, no excuse or reason necessary.”
“Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct elections entirely by mail (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington), which means voters do not need to request a ballot, and instead automatically receive one,” the report added.
However, election security experts have widely acknowledged that mass mail-in ballots present multiple avenues for election fraud.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which participated in the censorship of Americans critical of the 2020 election, internally circulated a “mail-in voting risk” chart that identified six risks of mail-in ballots versus in-person voting.
Despite the acknowledged heightened risk of election fraud due to mass mail-in ballots, and the Covid emergency having come and gone in the United States, many states have made no-excuse mail-in ballots a permanent feature of their state elections.
The states are thus knowingly running their elections in a manner directly contrary to best election integrity practices. A single election day, photographic voter IDs, and paper ballots remain the best practices to fairly and securely run elections.
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