Letter to the editor: Mail-in voting would damage election process

In Patrick Varine’s article “Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald calls for primary election to be conducted by mail” (April 13, TribLIVE), Fitzgerald asserts “Holding an in-person election in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic would be, in and of itself, a disaster.”

The real disaster would be holding any election by mail because the opportunity for fraud is truly massive. A person running for office in Allegheny County is supplied a complete list of all registered voters in the district he or she is seeking office in in order to get the required signatures to get his or her name on the ballot. Because these lists are seldom purged, they often contain deceased people, but it is the huge amount of registered voters on the list who seldom vote that poses the biggest source for candidates to siphon fraudulent votes.

Although the board of elections does not know who you vote for, it does know how frequently you vote. All a candidate or his/her party would have to do is send in mail-in ballots for the many registered voters who haven’t been to the polls in a long time, and there are truly many. Talk about stuffing the ballot box.

I cannot think of anything that would be more damaging to our elections in this country than allowing a mail-in process.

Daniel C. Mahon Sr.

Bloomfield