To the editor:

If you were the printer who was responsible for printing the election ballots for New Ulm, how many different versions of the ballot would you have to print?

Well, let’s see. There are several county and state officials that everyone in the city would be voting on, so that would only require one version for the whole city. But for the city council and school board positions, each area of the city would have to have to have a ballot that listed only the candidates for that part of the city. All told, you would probably have to have at least ten or twelve different versions so that everyone had the right list of candidates on his or her ballot.

That should make it quite difficult for anyone to rig an election. If a corrupt state candidate came to New Ulm and stuffed the ballot boxes with 10,000 ballots from Ward 3, it would be easy to prove that fraud had occurred. All you would have to do is examine all of the city’s ballots and count how many votes were made on each different version of the ballot. If you find that Ward 3 has 3,000 actual voters, but there were 10,000 votes submitted on Ward 3’s version of the ballot, you know that fraud occurred.

This ballots examination process is exactly what is being done in Maricopa County, Arizona, to determine whether there was fraud in the 2020 election. That county is huge, and their elections require more than 600 different versions of the ballot. If it is found that one of those versions has far more ballots counted than the number of voters in that ward or area, then they will know that fraud occurred.

If there was no fraud, they will find that each version of the ballot had no more votes than the number of voters in that ward or area. But if someone produced large numbers of illegal ballots, then one version of the ballot will have far too many votes.

Was there fraud? We’ll see. The ballots are being examined.

Michael Thom

New Ulm