Following concerns over research to embed vaccines in produce, the Tennessee Senate has passed a bill which would require any food containing vaccines or vaccine materials to be labeled as pharmaceutical drugs.

The bill, HB 1894, was passed by the Senate in a 23-6 vote on March 28 after the state House passed it 73-22 on March 4. It awaits the governor's signature.

The bill comes in response to a University of California-Riverside research project looking into whether mRNA which targets pathogens could be implanted into edible plants, which would then be consumed. The research was funded by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

"You would have to get a prescription for that to make sure that we know how much of the lettuce you have to eat based off of your body type so we don’t under-vaccinate you, which leads to the possibility of the efficacy of the drug being compromised, or we overdose you based off how much lettuce is [eaten]," said Republican state Rep. Scott Cepicky during a House committee meeting in February, WKRN-TV reports.

Cepicky said that the bill, which local media described as a move targeting "vaccine lettuce," would classify foods modified to act as vaccines, as pharmaceuticals.

"So if you want to consume them you would go to your doctor and get a prescription," he said.

In a 2021 press release, UC Riverside associate professor of Botany and Plant Sciences, Juan Pablo, said "We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens," adding "Farmers could also eventually grow entire fields of it."

According to Pablo, "Ideally, a single plant would produce enough mRNA to vaccinate a single person."

Another researcher, Nicole Steinmetz, said in the same release that they planned to use nanoparticles or "plant viruses, for gene delivery to plants."

When asked by WKRN-TV about the status of the research, a UC Riverside spokesperson said that the project is not yet complete.

"Research into the process of having plant chloroplasts express vaccine chemistry is ongoing. There are no definitive results to report," said Jules Berinstein after the Tennessee bill was passed.

Democrat Senators oppose

During the debate on the Tennessee Senate Floor, some lawmakers questioned the need for the bill.

"Does the sponsor know of any instances of there being food offered in the state of Tennessee that contains vaccines in some kind of a retail or public forum?" asked state Sen. Heidi Campbell.

Rep. Cepicky hit back, highlighting in February that a Kentucky company has already been "infecting growing tobacco plants with a genetically modified coronavirus" to see if it can produce antibodies for a potential vaccine, adding that the company "can already do this right now."

Massie sounds the alarm

In 2023, US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) raised concerns over the use of federal money to create "transgenic edible vaccines," which would transform edible plants such as spinach and lettuce into mRNA vaccine delivery vehicles.

Rep. Massie: "I Think It's Dangerous to Play God with Our Food" 9/27/2023
There’s a push to create edible vaccines—food products like tomatoes, lettuce, or milk that are genetically modified to have the effects of a vaccination when someone consumes them.
Rep. Thomas Massie… pic.twitter.com/saA0JxZQfB

— Camus (@newstart_2024) March 6, 2024

In September 2023 during a debate over an appropriations bill, Massie highlighted an incident in which an edible vaccine was introduced into a corn crop used to feed pigs in order to mitigate diarrhea. The corn crop, however, became commingled with a soybean crop - contaminating 500,000 bushels that had to be recalled.

"Do we want humans eating vaccines that were grown in corn meant to stop pigs from getting diarrhea? I don’t think we want that to happen. Yet that almost happened, and it could happen," said Massie. "There is another case where the pollen cross-contaminated another crop of corn, and 155 acres of corn had to be burned. What are the cases where we’re not discovering this? I think it’s dangerous to play God with our food."

Authored by Joakim Book via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Wealth in a free society is a rough tallying score of how much economic value someone has provided to the rest of us. A rich person’s wealth — bar inheritance and cronyism — is a testament to how much they enriched us...

As Johan Norberg writes in The Capitalist Manifesto

If anything remains of the revenue when employees, suppliers and lenders have been paid for their efforts, it is called ‘profit’ and we are very angry when it’s a large sum. In fact, we should be happier the bigger it is, because it shows that everyone else in the chain has been paid first and that the company has still succeeded in its ambition to transform time and resources into something we value.

Billionaires aren’t policy failures, but clear indications of (distributed) value created: jobs and incomes, improved goods and services, and a better standard of living. “Capitalism,” said the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in a Mont Pelerin lecture in 1958, “is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.”

But the rich don’t pay their fair share, you might say. On the contrary, any serious investigation reveals that they pay everyone’s share. Some one-fifth of federal tax revenue already comes directly from the incomes of the richest one million American households. The incomes of the highest-earning 20 percent of households more or less bankroll the federal government. The Congressional Budget Office in its “The Distribution of Household Income” report notes:

High-income households generally pay a larger share of federal taxes. In 2020, for example, households in the highest income quintile received about 56 percent of all income and paid 81 percent of federal taxes.

But income inequality is a runaway train, you might say. On the contrary, any serious investigation shows that the pre-tax income of the top 1 percent in America has been roughly flat for twenty years. Counting after-tax income instead, as a share of total income the super-rich today lay claim to about the same share (9 percent) they did in the 1960s. In the UK, income inequality is the same today as when Thatcher left office, and globally speaking inequality is probably lower than it’s been in 150 years. 

But for whatever ideological reason, maybe you want the rich to be eaten. Well, the hungry behemoth that is the US federal government is already eating the rich, yet its stewards and proponents want ever more. It’s not just that government spending has exploded out of control at least since the pandemic, but in the last five years tax revenue as a share of GDP has increased in almost all rich countries, from France and the UK to South Korea and the US. And the American tax system is already almost unbelievably progressive.

Like an unstoppable Pacman, the world’s governments keep eating.

It’s not even that easy to (painlessly!) commandeer the abundant wealth the rich supposedly have.

Even If You Want It, The Rich Don’t Have Your Money

The rich aren’t rich because they stole your stuff and hoarded it, like some mythical dragon. Mostly, they’re rich because they built a thriving business that made all (or at least a lot)  of us better off, and we, in the form of market returns,  rewarded them handsomely for that creation. In Bureaucracy, one of Mises’ lesser-known works, the roles of consumers and entrepreneurs are quite clear: “the real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.” By their very actions of buying certain goods over others, consumers “decide who should own the capital and run the plants.”

Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk aren’t ultrarich because they chose to be (though they may have), worked hard (which they verifiably did), or stole their wealth from someone else (which they didn’t). They’re rich because consumers rewarded them with purchases and because financial markets priced their respective company shares accordingly.

Whatever your opinion on Amazon’s effect on local commerce or its labor conditions — to say nothing of Tesla’s pretty ruthless use of taxpayer subsidies — it’s undeniable that their companies have provided cheaper and better goods to many, many people.

Most people in my generation think about wealth as a pile of money, stashed away in a bank vault or the basement of some outrageous mansion. Instead, wealth largely consists of ownership in productive businesses that make the world run (and, overwhelmingly, real estate, which is even more hopeless to expropriate and redistribute).

And it’s not that easy to just “take it,” even abstracting away all the political or legal hurdles to expropriating Americans’ private property.

Dismantling companies to give their “value” back to the deserving poor — many of whom will lose their jobs in said companies in the process — seems like a bad idea, since you’ll destroy that value. For large, publicly traded companies, we do have some neatly divisible spoils in the form of shares. Per the SEC, Bezos owns some nine percent of Amazon, or 938,251,817 shares in total.

Nobody needs that much, say the billionaires’ critics confidently, so we righteously confiscate 900 million of those, worth about $158 billion at the time of writing. 166 days into this Fiscal Year, the Treasury has spent 2,684,154,624,114 dollars — almost 3 trillion, comfortably on its way to a proposed $7.2 trillion for the year — a neat $23 billion a day. At face market value, Bezos’ great fortune would finance the government for… less than a week.

Except that it won’t even do that.

The minute we announce this expropriation, the price of AMZN — and all other similar companies we may or may not confiscate in the future — falls like a rock. No buyers. What we’ll raise from this insane play amounts to much less than the face value of the stocks the day before. 

Let’s keep making fantastical wishes and assume that it didn’t — maybe all investors agree that this policy is necessary, and nobody is troubled by it — as we sell the shares to finance spending (or hand them out to the 100 million or so poorest Americans who, in turn, sell them instead), we’re mechanically crashing the price of AMZN shares. Ordinarily, Nasdaq trades about 46 million Amazon shares a day and since only a small portion of that is net buying (index funds, brokers, intraday trading etc), it would take us months to offload our 900 million in spoils. Realistically, we’d net a much smaller amount from our sophisticated heist.

If we do this bright and early on a Monday morning, when Sunday comes around we’re once again broke, assuming of course that we acquired the full market value. Does anyone think we can repeat the trick next week? Surely, all the other potential targets saw what we just did, and have been busy moving to Singapore or London or the Bahamas, transferring their ownership to offshore entities, or otherwise shielding them in nonprofits or any number of other defensive measures to ensure that the proceeds from the next billionaire we go after will be much, much lower.

We expropriated (“ate”) the top-2 richest American and aside from financial market chaos, all we got for it was financial support for the bottom third of Americans equivalent to one round of stimmies — plus a whole lot of disincentives to live, work, create, invest, or incorporate in America. What we achieve is a one-time transfer from the ultrarich to the poor, and permanent damage to the very economic goose that laid America’s abundance of golden eggs.

So…Don’t Take It?

If the rich are rich because they provided the rest of us with a lot of value through the businesses they built, we want the rich to be richer still — not poorer. The rich aren’t rich enough.

If we wish to expropriate their riches for our allegedly benevolent ends, we’ll need much more than their current riches to move the needle. The rich aren’t rich enough.

Taxing the rich truly is a lunatic’s solution to our fiscal headaches — a nightmarish one at that.

Instead of trying to orchestrate a costly and not-that-fruitful reshuffling of the pie, perhaps we should just leave the rich to keep expanding it — for their sake, for our sake, and ultimately for the peace of the republic.

Or, formulated as the “Bourgeois Deal” by Deirdre McCloskey’s and Art Carden’s condensed version of McCloskey’s three-part Bourgeois masterpiece — Leave me alone and I’ll make you rich.

Via The Brownstone Institute,

In 1845, Congress established Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday of November. The Act sought “to establish a uniform time” for Americans to cast their ballots for president. Historically, voters needed to provide a valid reason – such as illness or military service – to qualify for absentee ballots.

But Covid served as a pretext to overturn that tradition. Just 25% of votes in 2020 occurred at the polls on Election Day. Mail-in voting more than doubled. Key swing states eliminated the need to provide a valid reason to cast absentee ballots. The virus and racial justice became justifications to disregard verification methods like signature requirements.

Rejection rates for absentee ballots plummeted by more than 80% in some states as the Covid regime welcomed an unprecedented increase in mail-in voting. Politicians and media outlets ignored rampant voter fraud in the months leading up to the election. They treated concerns surrounding absentee voting as obscure conspiracy theories despite a bipartisan commission describing it as “the largest source of potential voter fraud” just a decade earlier. 

It is now clear that the overhaul of our election system was a deliberate initiative from the outset of the pandemic response. In March 2020, when the Government’s official policy was still “two weeks to flatten the curve,” the administrative state began instituting the infrastructure to hijack the November presidential election, more than 30 weeks beyond when the Covid response was supposed to end. 

March 2020: The CDC and the CARES Act Meddle in the Election

On March 12, 2020, the CDC issued a recommendation for states and localities to “encourage voters to use voting methods that minimize direct contact with other people,” including “mail-in methods of voting.”

Two weeks later, President Trump signed the $2 trillion CARES Act, which offered states $400 million to re-engineer their election processes for that November. 

At the time, proponents of the CARES Act argued it was necessary to reopen the country. For example, the New York Times argued it was “critical to fund and implement the safety measures necessary to let Americans get back to work, school and play without a recurrence of the virus.”

But political actors immediately plotted ways to use the funds to entrench their power long past the proposed two-week lockdowns. Nearly every swing state announced plans to promote mail-in voting and reduce electoral safeguards in a Congressional report. 

“Michigan will use the funds to bolster vote by mail,” the report announced. Governor Gretchen Whitmer received $11.3 million from the CARES Act to change election procedures in her state. In November, 57% of Michigan voters (over 3 million people) cast their ballot by mail. For the first time, the state did not require a reason for absentee voting, and mail-in ballots more than doubled. President Trump would go on to lose Michigan by just 150,000 votes.

When Trump signed the CARES Act, just 0.05% of Michigan residents had tested positive for Covid. The state’s political leaders later boasted that their agenda had not been focused on public health. “Even when there’s not a pandemic, once people begin using the absentee ballot process, they’re much more likely to continue to do so in the future,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson after Election Day.

Pennsylvania received $14.2 million from the CARES Act to address its election process. At the time, the infection rate in the Keystone State was 1 in 6,000 (0.017%). Democratic Governor Tom Wolf’s administration told the federal government it would use its plans to increase absentee voting. In November, 2.5 million Pennsylvanians voted by mail. President Biden won 75% of those votes – a difference of 1.4 million. President Trump lost the state by under 100,000 votes.

The CARES Act provided Wisconsin with over $7 million for election matters. Democratic Governor Tom Evers said the state would use funds to provide “absentee ballot envelopes,” to develop “the statewide voter registration system and online absentee ballot request portal,” and “to account for additional costs” related to mail-in voting.

Governor Evers explained, “Having as many absentee ballots as possible is absolutely a top priority [and] always has been given the emergency we’re in.” Eight months later, 1.9 million of the state’s 3.3 million voters cast their ballot by mail. The rejection rate for absentee ballots plummeted from 1.4% in 2016 to 0.2%. President Biden won Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes. 

Democratic activists were unsatisfied with the $400 million added to the national debt to reshape the elections. Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation offered an additional $300 million. In Time, Molly Ball celebrated the “shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.” She quoted Amber McReynolds, the president of “nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute,” who called the government’s reluctance to provide additional funding “a failure at the federal level.” Despite her professed “non-partisanship,” President Biden rewarded her service by appointing her to the Board of the US Postal Service. 

In Time, Ball hailed the mail-in activists’ efforts, which included targeting “Black voters” who may have otherwise “preferred to exercise their franchise in person.” They focused on social media outreach to try to convince people that a “prolonged [vote] count wasn’t a sign of problems.” Their informational warfare may have changed Americans’ perception on mail-in voting, but it could not eradicate the predictable controversies that it created. 

April and May 2020: Voter Fraud Skyrockets

In May 2020, New Jersey held municipal elections and required all voting take place via mail. The State’s third largest city, Paterson, held its election for city council. The results should have been a national scandal that ended the push for mail-in voting.

Shortly after the election, the Postal Service discovered “hundreds of mail-in ballots” in one town mailbox. A Snapchat video showed a man named Abu Razyen illegally handling a stack of ballots he said was for candidate Shanin Khalique. Khalique initially defeated his opponent by just eight votes. A recount found their vote was tied.

Paterson resident Ramona Javier never received her mail-in ballot for the election. Neither did eight of her family members and neighbors, yet they were all listed as having voted. “We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she told the press. “This is corruption. This is fraud.”

Election officials rejected 19% of the ballots from Paterson, a city with over 150,000 residents. While Paterson’s election was particularly troublesome, mail-in ballots were problematic across the state. Thirty other New Jersey municipalities held vote-by-mail elections that day, and the average disqualification rate was 9.6%.

New Jersey brought voting fraud charges against City Councilman Michael Jackson, Councilman-Elect Alex Mendez, and two other men for their “criminal conduct involving mail-in ballots during the election.” All four were charged with illegally collecting, procuring, and submitting mail-in ballots.

A state judge later ordered a new vote, finding that the May election “was not the fair, free and full expression of the intent of the voters. It was rife with mail in vote procedural violations constituting nonfeasance and malfeasance.”

Politicians refused to concede that the incident revealed the vulnerability of absentee balloting. Instead, Governor Phil Murphy told the press that the scandal was a good sign. “I view that as a positive data point,” he argued. “Some guys tried to screw around with the system. They got caught by law enforcement. They’ve been indicted. They’ll pay a price.”

Murphy and other allies of Joe Biden ignored the threat, presuming the forces would not hurt their hopes that November. 

In Wisconsin, the April 2020 primary election offered further evidence of the challenges and corruption surrounding mail-in voting. Following the primary, a postal center outside Milwaukee discovered three tubs of absentee ballots that never reached their intended recipients. Fox Point, a village outside Milwaukee, has a population of under 7,000 people. 

Beginning in March, Fox Point received between 20 and 50 undelivered absentee ballots per day. In the weeks leading up to the election, the village manager said that increased to between 100 and 150 ballots per day. On election day, the town received a plastic mail bin with 175 unmailed ballots. “We’re not sure why this happened,” said the village manager. “Nobody seems to be able to tell me why.”

Democrats admitted the system threatened election integrity. “This has all the makings of a Florida 2000 if we have a close race,” said Gordon Hintz, the Democratic minority leader in the Wisconsin State Assembly. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went further. “It’s a harder system to administer, and obviously it’s a harder system to police writ large,” he said. Cuomo continued, “People showing up, people actually showing ID, is still the easiest system to assure total integrity.”

The Wisconsin primary also featured special elections for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A liberal judge upset the incumbent conservative justice, and partisans embraced their overhaul of the electoral system. The New York Times reported: “Wisconsin Democrats are working to export their template for success – intense digital outreach and a well-coordinated vote-by-mail operation – to other states in the hope that it will improve the party’s chances in local and statewide elections and in the quest to unseat President Trump in November.”

Despite the corruption, the lost ballots, and the admissions of threats to electoral integrity, the process had been a success in political terms; their candidate had won. The ends had justified the means. Citizens lost faith in their election process, and political leaders readily admitted that their concerns were justified; but the professional politicos and their mouthpiece, the New York Times, characterized the disaster as a “template for success.”

Controversies continued to emerge surrounding mail-in ballots.

In September 2020, a government contractor threw Trump mail-in ballots in the trash in Pennsylvania. ABC News reported that “ballots had been found in a dumpster next to the elections building.” A week later, three trays of mail with absentee ballots were found in a ditch in Wisconsin.

In Nevada, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony offered gifts, including gift cards, jewelry, and clothing to Native Americans who showed up to vote. Activist Bethany Sam organized the event, where she donned a Biden-Harris mask and stood in front of the Biden-Harris campaign bus.

Voters in California received ballots with no place to vote for president, over 20% of ballots mailed to voters in Teaneck, New Jersey, had the wrong Congressional districts listed, and Franklin County, Ohio reported sending over 100,000 absentee ballots to the wrong address due to an “envelope stuffing error.”

In October, Texas police arrested Carrollton Mayoral Candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed on 109 counts of fraud for forging mail-in ballots. Authorities discovered fraudulent ballots at Mohamed’s residence with fictitious licenses. That same month, a Pennsylvania district attorney charged Lehigh County Elections Judge Everett “Erika” Bickford with “prying into ballots” and altering the entries from a local election that June. That election was decided by just 55 votes.

Reports continued to emerge after the election. The New York Post uncovered election records that showed dead people had cast absentee ballots that November.

California law enforcement arrested two men with a 41-count criminal complaint for allegedly submitting over 8,000 fraudulent voter registration applications on behalf of homeless people. Their goal was to get Carlos Montenegro, one of the defendants, elected Mayor of Hawthorne, a city in Los Angeles County. The state also alleged that Montenegro committed perjury by falsifying names and signatures in his paperwork for his mayoral campaign.

In 2022, a Georgia investigation found more than 1,000 absentee ballots that never left the Cobb County government facility. Two months earlier, mail-in ballots from the 2020 election were discovered in a Baltimore USPS facility. In 2023, Michigan police found hundreds of mail-in ballots from the 2020 election in a township clerk’s storage unit.

All of this was entirely predictable, but perhaps that was the point. From the outset, the Covid regime sought to abolish the safeguards of our election system despite well-known concerns regarding election integrity. 

The United States of Amnesia: Voter Fraud Was Nothing New

The Covid regime’s messaging was clear: only conspiratorial lunatics would question the integrity of an election system that more than doubles its mail-in voting. FBI Director Christopher Wray testified, “We have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”

But this wasn’t true. It contradicted long-standing conclusions regarding electoral integrity. Just as the public health apparatus abandoned thousands of years of epidemiological practice to implement lockdowns, the media and elected officials abandoned principles that until that moment had been common sense.

Following the controversy of the 2000 Presidential election, the United States formed a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform. President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, chaired the group.

After five years of research, the group published its final report – “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections.” It offered a series of recommendations to reduce voter fraud, including enacting voter-ID laws and limiting absentee voting. The commission was unequivocal: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

The report continued: “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”

The findings were reinforced by subsequent election scandals. 

A 2012 New York Times headline read: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.” The article made the front page of the paper and echoed the concerns of the Carter-Baker Commission. “Fraud Easier via Mail,” the paper explained.

“You could steal some absentee ballots or stuff a ballot box or bribe an election administrator or fiddle with an electronic voting machine,” said Yale Law professor Heather Gerken. That explains, she said, “why all the evidence of stolen elections involves absentee ballots and the like.”

The Times continued the potential corruption of mail-in ballots. “On the most basic level, absentee voting replaces the oversight that exists at polling places with something akin to an honor system,” the author wrote. The Times then cited US Circuit Court Judge Richard A. Posner: “Absentee voting is to voting in person as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”

The report went on: “Voters in nursing homes can be subjected to subtle pressure, outright intimidation or fraud. The secrecy of their voting is easily compromised. And their ballots can be intercepted both coming and going.”

Historic controversies supported this consensus. The 1997 Miami mayoral election resulted in 36 arrests for absentee-ballot fraud. A judge voided the results and ordered the city to hold a new election due to “a pattern of fraudulent, intentional, and criminal conduct.” The results were reversed in the subsequent election.

Following Dallas’s 2017 City Council race, authorities sequestered 700 mail-in ballots signed “Jose Rodriguez.” Elderly voters alleged that party activists had forged their signatures on their mail-in ballots. Miguel Hernandez later pled guilty to the crime of forging their signatures after collecting unfilled ballots, and using them to support his candidate of choice.

The following year, it appeared that Republic Mark Harris defeated Democrat Dan McCready in a North Carolina congressional race. Election officials noticed irregularities in the mail-in votes and refused to certify the election, citing evidence and “claims of…concerted fraudulent activities.” The state ordered a special election the following year.

In 2018, the Democratic National Commission challenged an Arizona law that set safeguards around absentee voting, including limiting who could handle mail-in ballots. US District Judge Douglas L. Rayes, an Obama appointee, upheld the law. “Indeed, mail-in ballots by their very nature are less secure than ballots cast in person at polling locations,” he wrote. He found that “the prevention of voter fraud and preservation of public confidence in election integrity” were important state interests and cited the Carter-Baker Commission’s finding that “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

The rest of the world recognized the obvious threat that mail-in voting poses to election integrity. In 1975, France banned postal ballots after rampant voter fraud. Ballots were cast with the names of dead Frenchmen, and political activists in Corsica stole ballots and bribed voters. 

In 1991, Mexico mandated voter photo IDs and banned absentee ballots after the Institutional Revolutionary Party repeatedly committed fraud to maintain power. In Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, photo ID is required to get an absentee ballot.

In August 2020, economist John Lott analyzed how Covid was being used as a pretext to overhaul electoral standards in the United States. He wrote: 

Thirty-seven states have so far changed their mail-in voting procedures this year in response to the Coronavirus. Despite frequent claims that President Trump’s warning about vote fraud/voting buying with mail-in ballots is “baselessly” or “without evidence” about mail-in vote fraud, there are numerous examples of vote fraud and vote buying with mail-in ballots in the United States and across the world. Indeed, concerns over vote fraud and vote buying with mail-in ballots causes the vast majority of countries to ban mail-in voting unless the citizen is living abroad.

There are fraud problems with mail-in absentee ballots but the problems with universal mail-in ballots are much more significant. Still most countries ban even absentee ballots for people living in their countries.

Most developed countries ban absentee ballots unless the citizen is living abroad or require Photo-IDs to obtain those ballots. Even higher percentages of European Union or other European countries ban absentee for in country voters.

Political actors treated opposition to absentee balloting with scorn while ignoring its history of corruption. Mail-in voting may have been the decisive factor in the 2020 election, but Trump and his allies searched for other explanations to avoid his complicity in signing the CARES Act. 

The Trump campaign promised to produce “irrefutable” evidence that proved Trump won the election “in a landslide.” “I’m going to release the Kraken,” one Trump election lawyer told Lou Dobbs in November 2020. President Trump and Rudy Giuliani tweeted blame at Dominion voting machines. Sean Hannity said privately that Giuliani was “acting like an insane person.” 

Two days later, he told viewers about a “software error” from Dominion that “wrongfully awarded Joe Biden thousands of ballots that were cast for President Trump, until the problem was amazingly fixed.” In August 2023, Trump announced that he would release an “irrefutable report” demonstrating voter fraud in Georgia. He canceled the announcement two days later.

In the process, they ignored a far more obvious explanation.

Presidential elections in the 21st century have been decided by an average of 44 electoral votes. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin offer a combined 62 votes in the Electoral College.

Under the pretext of Covid, states abolished their electoral safeguards.

They turned Election Day into a month of voting.

After prominent Democrats refused to certify the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections, the victors chastised any concerns for electoral integrity as attacks on democracy.

This is all theater. From the outset of the pandemic response, the liberalization of voting rules was integral, all justified based on nonscientific grounds while invoking the cover of science. It wasn’t stopping disease spread that drove the dramatic upheaval in the American system of voting that has caused such widespread distrust. It was the drive for a result different from one that swept the country four years earlier.