CLEVELAND -- As you read this, county election boards all over the state are being inundated with mailed-in ballots for the Ohio primary election that “ends” on Tuesday. It will be interesting to see how long it takes workers to organize and count those votes. Let’s just say that I’m not expecting to read the customary list of winners in Wednesday’s paper.

Gov. Mike DeWine had little practical choice in his decision to delay the vote and switch to an all-mail Election Day. But we do have a choice with the much larger voter turnout in the November presidential election.

And what happens here next week might serve as a sort of preamble to what could happen then, if Democrats get their way and manage to slingshot the current coronavirus shutdown into a federally mandated national mail-only election.

Inevitable snafus in counting the votes, however, are far from the most perilous scenario in regard to a system of mail-in or drop-off ballots.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that no matter how the Nov. 3 vote turns out, furious accusations of fraud will make what happened after the 2016 campaign look like a student council race. With the presidential election still a bit more than six months away, the two sides are already gearing up:

Conservatives are casting a jaundiced eye at the eagerness of their opponents to embrace the mail-only process, suspecting skullduggery afoot.

Liberals and their media partisans are spinning it a different way, touting the mail-in approach as a way to increase voter participation and predicting that the only way President Donald Trump can win re-election is by cheating, and suppressing votes in poor and minority communities.

That’s nonsense. Well-established registration procedures ensure that anyone who cares enough to follow the rules has plenty of time, and an unfettered opportunity to vote. But those who are worried about how a mail-only vote could subvert the election process have good reason for concern.

The magic words are “ballot harvesting,” and one need look back no further than the 2018 midterm elections to see that in action.

California’s population is overwhelmingly liberal, but what happened in 2018, when the GOP lost every statewide vote, seven of its 14 seats in Congress and enough seats in the state legislature to drop below 25 percent representation, ought to trouble anyone from either party who is interested in fair elections.

Several GOP candidates went to bed on election night comfortably ahead, only to learn days -- and in one case, weeks – later that they had lost.

What happened was ballot harvesting, a process by which partisan operatives go door to door, offering to collect people’s ballots and drop them off at the elections board. The California legislature legalized and encouraged it in 2016.

Examples of abuse are easy to find in news reports.

One is a doorbell video of a woman named Lulu, at a home in Santa Clarita, who told the homeowner she was there to “pick up your ballot.”

“We’re offering this new service but only to, like, people who are supporting the Democratic Party” said Lulu, “… and show you how to do it if you don’t know.”

Another is a submission from a suburban resident written for the Los Angeles Daily News, relating how a campaign worker knocked on his door and asked how he planned to vote, persistently offering to collect his ballot and turn it in for him. The writer reported that the worker already had a clipboard full of ballots from others.

How well does it work? Depends on how much you multiply the above. In Orange County alone, an unprecedented 250,000 ballots were dropped off on Election Day. How many were turned in by campaign operatives is, of course, impossible to know, but every Democratic candidate in the traditionally Republican county won – including Harley Rouda, who upended 30-year GOP incumbent Dana Rohrabacher, a winner by 40,000 votes just two years before.

When former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan opined that he smelled a rat, The Los Angeles Times snarkily editorialized that such tactics were available to both parties and that maybe the GOP just didn’t do it as well, adding in another commentary that “perhaps it is because [Ryan’s] not used to states that are making it easier for people to vote.”

Perhaps not. California helpfully sends out ballots to every registered voter in the state, whether they bother to request an absentee ballot or not. And judging from the above examples, California makes it so easy for people to vote that you don’t even have to do it yourself. You can just have somebody do it for you.

A bill that has already passed the House embodies a lot of the California process. Called the “For the People Act,” it would require all states to establish automatic voter registration based on names in state and federal agency databases, and mail them all ballots.

And then, we can presume, campaign workers will go around neighborhoods, “helping” people fill out their ballots and taking them to the election board. Might this involve persuasion, payoffs or intimidation, perhaps? Might the ballots of people who vote the wrong way get “lost” along on the way to the drop-off? You, as a student of human nature, tell me.

Sure, as the LA Times wrote, both parties could do this. But is this what we want our elections to devolve to?

Voting was once, and to many of us still is, a private, personal exercise. It’s nobody’s business who gets my vote, unless I choose to make it public. Under an enforced mail-in system, lots of people will know, including the stranger at my door who wants to help me fill out my ballot.

Consider the current situation as yet another reason the November vote will be critical. The “For the People Act” passed the House but died in the Senate. The Democrats are only a couple of senators away from controlling both houses of Congress, which would guarantee it passing into law as soon as 2022.

If that’s the way you want future elections in this country to go, root for a Democratic sweep in November.

Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

To reach Ted Diadiun: tdiadiun@cleveland.com

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