Amazon has accidentally given us a good primer on why universal mail-in voting (supported by the Washington Post, which is also owned by Jeff Bezos) simply isn’t dependable.

Amazon, which has always resisted having a unionized work force, filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to prevent mail-in voting in a contest with the union in Alabama.

The Washington Post called opposition to universal mail-in votes on the part of former President Trump “bogus fear mongering.”

Apparently, it is not bogus fear mongering when Amazon opposes mail-in voting in a union contest, however.

Amazon’s petition can be read at The Verge.

The petition argues for in-person voting in the union election for the same reasons many of us argued for in-person voting in the 2020 presidential campaign: it’s harder to cheat with in-person voting.

PJ Media summarized one of the points made by the filing:

Amazon further claimed that mail-in voting in union elections is fundamentally different from that in political elections. In political elections, the Amazon lawyers wrote, a “continuously updated voter address roll” and the ability to vote in person or by mail “promote security and voter turnout.”

But voter rolls are not continuously updated: that they are outdated was one of the key arguments opponents of universal mail-in voting advanced. Dead people and people who have moved away from states remain on the rolls, and when ballots are mailed to such “voters,” it is easy for cheaters to seize and use them.

Here is what a Pew study found regarding mail-in voting:

Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters. Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.

If mail-in voting is suspect for a relatively small class of voters (people who work for Amazon in a plant in Alabama), think how insecure it can be when it involves a massive number of people, i.e., all voters in the United States.

Fortunately, presidential elections are handled by the states, and we have ample time for states to reform voting procedures before the next presidential election (and for state and local elections, too!).

If we can’t pull back on mail-in voting, we can at least institute reforms to make it accurate. The state of Florida reformed procedures after the 2000 recount. Florida has mail-in voting, but it has taken measures to ensure that the process is fair.

Surely, the results of a national election are as sacrosanct as a union election at an Amazon plant.