Official Gets Law Enforcement Involved After Seeing Man's Front-Yard Critique of Vote-by-Mail
From what I’ve heard, some people believe the United States Postal Service is trying its hardest to make it difficult for Americans to find a spot to mail their ballots in.
Given that the USPS was alleged (falsely) to have been taking collection boxes off of the street to help President Trump get re-elected, there’s obviously unease. However, whatever the case may be, I don’t think the search for a mailbox is so arduous in the state of Michigan that voters would dump their mail-in ballots in a toilet on the lawn of a house with a “RecallWhitmerNow.com sign” on it.
Just Don’t tell that to Ingham County, Michigan, Clerk Barb Byrum, a woman whose view of election security sounds like it’s taken more from the pages of a Christopher Buckley political satire than from the Lansing State Journal, whence this news originally came to us.
Byrum has a problem with a resident of the city of Mason who doesn’t like mail-in voting, apparently has an extra toilet and decided to advertise both of these facts on the front lawn. Next to the toilet was a signboard saying “Place Mail In Ballots Here” along with an arrow pointed at the toilet. Tee hee.
Despite the fact that Clerk Byrum is serially posting dad jokes on her Twitter account under the hashtag #JokeThenVote, she couldn’t have taken this with more po-faced rage, saying that it might be illegal.
“It’s solicitation of absentee ballots into a container,” Byrum told the State Journal on Friday. “Our election integrity is not a game. I expect everyone to act appropriately, and this is unacceptable.”
Yes, you act how Clerk Byrum tells you to act in an election year and you act that way until she tells you not to. Your literal toilet humor isn’t protected First Amendment speech while she’s on watch. I’m glad we have her looking out for the vast Russian electoral conspiracy wherever it may rear its ugly head.
This wasn’t just an idle threat by a public official, mind you, a fist shaken toward the heavens by an elected Democrat at a conservative who doesn’t have a Gen. Jack D. Ripper-like fear of the Russians when it comes to election interference. Now, I’m only going to say this once for the rest of the article, because if I kept on repeating this we’d be here until Election Day: I’m not making this up. Byrum didn’t just say that it might be illegal, she called police on the homeowner.
Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk of Ingham County, filed a complaint with police over the display, saying it could mislead people who aren’t familiar with the voting system. https://t.co/T5tVZoDIFW
— WSBT (@WSBT) September 19, 2020
Not only did Byrum call the police, she found the voter’s records and noted it was “more than a little ironic” that the individual had voted absentee for the past three years. Yes, that information is publicly available. Using it against a private resident whose lawn display wouldn’t be known aside from Byrum’s intervention is more than a bit troublesome.
“It is a felony to take illegal possession of an absentee ballot,” Byrum said Friday, according to The Associated Press.
“Elections in this country are to be taken seriously and there are many people who are voting by mail for the first time this election.”
And they’ll think that if they put ballots in a toilet on someone’s lawn they’ll get mailed in?
I want you to know how risible that statement is. Anyone who writes about politics for a living gets inured to how much contempt those who are elected to public office hold for those who have elected them. It’s like an opiate: You have to administer higher and higher and higher doses of the drug to get any kind of effect.
Consider the fact that I’ve been writing about this level of contempt for six years now — and I’m on the Democrat stupidity beat, so we’re talking a pretty heavy tolerance here — and I had to stop three times while writing the sentence about first-time voters thinking they put mail-in ballots in a john on someone’s front lawn because I was incapacitated by laughter. I had to stop a fourth time as I wrote the sentence about writing that sentence. I got through that one all right, albeit with a chuckle.
We’re moving on because the more I think about this, I’m picturing myself being checked into a mental institution by my loved ones, only being able to say two words between the involuntary fits of laughter: “Barb” and “Byrum.” I’ll just say this much, though — I suspect the reason Byrum cares so much is because she thinks all of these people would vote Democrat.
The Ingham County clerk says someone else shares some of the blame: President Trump, she said, “is encouraging people to lose faith in the absentee voting process.” So much so, apparently, that voters may forget what that big white thingy that makes the whooshing sound in their bathroom does, see one of them in the middle of someone’s front yard, and put their ballots in there, as per the signboard’s suggestion. (See, there I go again. I’m going to laugh myself into the funny farm.)
“This kind of behavior needs to be quashed immediately,” Byrum told the State Journal in a phone interview. “They are making a mockery of our elections. I’m not going to stand idly by and watch it happen.”
I know I said I wouldn’t, but it needs to be restated: I couldn’t make up an election official who’s so afraid of people “making a mockery of our elections” that she makes a national story out of herself because she called the po-po over a bathroom convenience joke.
Whoever this homeowner is, there’s no evidence of intent to interfere in the election in any way. Whoever it is thinks mail-in voting is and expressed those feeling using the level of humor you’d find on Nickelodeon on your average Saturday night. A cheerless functionary was so outraged by this that she called the cops — who clearly don’t have enough on their plate right now — and did so under the auspices of worrying about “solicitation of absentee ballots into a container.”
Michigan law stipulates that illegally taking possession of an absentee ballot is a felony that’s punishable by five years in jail and a $1,000 fine. Even if you put this homeowner on the hook for any ballots put into this toilet, I willing to bet no one will spend a day in jail — or in court, for that matter.
Meanwhile, should you wish to engage in political funnies that Byrum feels falls under the aegis of “act[ing] appropriately,” here you go:
Where do computers go to dance?⁰The disk-o#JokeThenVote
— BarbByrum (@BarbByrum) September 17, 2020
If you turn your constitutionally protected right to satire over to apparatchiks, quips like that tweet are what you’ll get.
Yes, that toilet joke regarding flushing mail-in ballots may have been about as funny as a case of the thrush, but it was still Lenny Bruce compared to this. The only humor there is that Barb Bynum apparently doesn’t realize there are now people who were born four years after Apple began eliminating the disk drive who can now vote.
Don’t worry, though, Barb — that won’t change the number of other people who find that joke funny. That number was always going to be zero. I can’t say you haven’t made me laugh otherwise, though.
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