It's Not 1945 - We've Figured Out Mail...

With a push from the White House to end mail-in voting - a reminder that there is no issue here, and we stopped paying bills and doing lots of other things in person a million years ago and it's fine.

My grandma Dorothy, circa 1970.

My grandma Dorothy used to walk to the utility company to pay her bill in person in cash. She’d stand in line with other people then get to the desk and pay the bill.

Then one day the utility company and the bank said - this is dumb. Here’s a checkbook so you don’t have to carry cash. You can pay them with this written IOU.

Is that safe…? My grandma wondered.

The response - we have safeguards and we’ll keep working on them and it will be safe and fine.

So she did that. She walked to the utility company, stood in line, and paid by check. And we figured it out and it was safe and fine.

Then one day the bank and the utility company said - this is dumb. You can write the check at home, put it in an envelope, stick it in a mail box, and pay it that way.

Is that safe…? My grandma wondered.

The response - we have safeguards and we’ll keep working on them and it will be safe and fine.

So she did that. She wrote checks on her kitchen table - I watched her do it often when I’d visit her. She’d put stamps on the envelopes and put it in the mail.

And we figured it out and it was safe and fine.

And my mom paid bills like this. And then I did.

Then one day - the bank and the utility company said - this is dumb. Let’s get you out of the check writing business and you can do your banking online - or inside an app.

Is that safe…? We all wondered.

The response - we have safeguards and we’ll keep working on them and it will be safe and fine.

Now, I do both. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve sent a check for over $ 5,000 in the mail, and I transferred a lot more than that from one account to another using an app.

Mail-in voting is popular all over the world, (apparently there’s been some recent misinformation spread about that) and not only here but in countries like Germany, Canada, and the UK. I also do mail-in voting and have since I’ve moved to California. It’s great. It’s safe - they have it figured out. I’ll tell you about it in the piece - I’ll tell you about my experience and the safeguards.

I don’t go to stores much anymore - I order everything online. I don’t go into a bank anymore. I don’t go to the utility company, wait in line, and hand the person at the desk cash or a check. That’s barbaric.

Think about if the White House told you that today, we’re going to stop sending checks in the mail too, because it’s not safe and fraud is rampant. And they follow up with - every banking and financial app and Docusign is also something super scary and we’d like to put an end to all of it.

We don’t do these things we did in the 1940’s at all. AT. ALL. We have biometric safeguards, state-of-the-art encryption technologies, signature scanning for verification on checks, electronic Docusign. I bought my house - MY HOUSE - sitting in my living room wiring the funds from my computer, and signing the contracts on Docusign.

We auto-pay, computers and mail-carriers handle everything. Everything. When there are issues, they’re fixed. We live this way, with modern conveniences that have become daily practice.

We’ve made these things safe and convenient and we all do them every day and never give them a second thought. When there’s fraud, we work through it.

Except for one and only one area in our lives - voting. Voting is the only practice where we’re told to do what grandma Dorothy did. We get ourselves to a place, stand in line, and walk over to a machine to physically cast our vote. In some places, we still do it in pencil. In pencil! 98% of all polling places in the United States have a “hard copy” option for ballots. Think about that.

Please. C’mon. I can transfer several hundred thousand dollars from my phone, sign contracts on an app, mail checks and other documents - but voting by mail (or app - which is where it should be going) isn’t safe and rife with fraud?

What’s actually going on here?