In anticipation of the 2024 presidential election, Illinois Democrats are proposing legislation to allow the state to partake in all mail-in voting, even though concerns over election security have grown in recent years.
The state House Ethics and Elections Committee, which Democratic state Rep. Carol Ammons, who proposed the legislation, is a member of, considered a bill Wednesday that would give counties the authorization to choose all-mail-in voting for elections, Just the News reported.
“Vote-by-mail has been proven by way of court order, as well as people’s utilization of vote-by-mail – I vote by mail – that it has been safe,” she said. “There have been no problems. I have not missed a single election. And people who use it increase their voter participation.”
Ammons’s husband, Aaron Ammons, the Champaign County clerk, endorsed his wife’s bill at the meeting, saying it would improve voter accessibility. If approved, House Bill 4198 would make Illinois the 24th state to adopt some amount of mail-in voting legislation.
“My experience as a voter and as a county clerk tells me there is no greater voter access than voting from the comforts of your home,” he said.
Unlike absentee voting, where people must request to vote by mail, mail-in voting would mean citizens just receive ballots in the mail. Critics of mail-in voting have scrutinized the method as being unsecure, with ballots going missing.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation found that in 2022 in California, a state that also allows mail-in voting, ten million ballots went missing out of the 22 million that were sent out. The foundation noted that while “it is fair to assume” the majority of the ten million were ignored or discarded, “we can only assume what happened. Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap.”
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President of PILF J. Christian Adams pointed out that the ratio of votes that President Joe Biden won in 2020 was smaller than the number of ballots that were undelivered in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, according to a video posted to YouTube by the account “PILFoundation.”
“When you send more ballots to faulty addresses and lose track of more ballots than the difference between winning and losing a state’s Electoral College vote, that’s a core system failure,” Adams said. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington are the current states that allow all mail-in voting for all elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.