NEW YORK (VINnews) — During the months leading up to the November elections, former president Donald Trump claimed numerous times that mail-in ballots could increase the risk of fraud. For example, in August 2020 Trump tweeted that “the Democrats are using mail drop boxes, which are a voter-security disaster. Among other things, they make it possible for a person to vote multiple times. Also, who controls them? Are they placed in Republican or Democrat areas? They are not Covid sanitised – a big fraud.”
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Trump raised serious questions regarding the veracity of mail-in ballots and the possible compromising of elections due to such ballots. However Twitter’s response was to put a warning on the tweet, stating that “We placed a public interest notice on this tweet for violating our civic-integrity policy for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting.” The tweet could not be liked, replied or retweeted.
During the same period, numerous media outlets belittled Trump’s fears, including the Amazon-owned Washington Post. In a September article the Post attacked “Trump’s fusillade of falsehoods on mail voting, stating that ” more than 100 times this year, Trump has peddled false claims or imaginary threats about voting by mail.” The Post asserted that “a mountain of evidence shows that mail voting has been almost entirely free of fraud through the decades.”
It is therefore somewhat surprising and even disconcerting to hear that when it comes to elections within Amazon itself, the company is willing to play a decidedly different tune. After a group of Alabama Amazon warehouse workers filed paperwork in November for an election to decided whether to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union,The National Labor Relations Board(NRLB), which oversees union votes, decided earlier this month that the vote would be conducted by mail, citing standards set up during the pandemic to keep workers and staffers safe.
Amazon’s response was to formally request that the Alabama workers be required to vote in person, claiming that the NRLB had ‘unfairly dismissed the company’s argument’ that its facility is safer than the surrounding Jefferson County, which hit a 20% COVID-19 positive test rate earlier this month. The company claimed that holding the election in a heated tent in the facility’s parking lot in conjunction with software designed to ensure social distancing would ‘minimize any risk of transmission’, according to a report by Bloomberg.
However the company’s most interesting claims were that mail elections “raised the risk of fraud and the coercion of workers”, as well as possibly “depressing turnout” since “as many as 29% of its more than 5,800 employees eligible to vote wouldn’t do so or would return incorrectly completed ballots.”
In light of the article in the Washington Post which as mentioned before is owned by Amazon, the claims of “risk of fraud” in the Amazon election are at best hypocritical and at worst downright falsehood. How can the same company claim that the US elections, a far more elaborate and cumbersome enterprise than a local union election, be “entirely free of fraud” from mail ballots, while at the same time claiming that its own miniscule union election could be tainted by fraud if conducted by mail? Amazon needs to provide a convincing answer to this question to maintain any kind of reputation for clean politics.
He knows more than we do. Whoever thinks there was no fraud in this past election is being naive.
Haha what does around comes around . Glad we admit that vote by mail at least smells funny . People have a valid point that it feels suspicious . I don’t think they need proof . I think of you implement a new system the onus is on you need to prove that the new system is fool proof
This is an attack on our democracy, ban amazon, all claims of fraud in mail in voting is a lie on par with goebbels.