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‘Safe and secure’
Scout’s honor
New Jersey joins list of states conducting elections by mail BY MICHELE ALPERIN
West Windsor Boy Scout Troop 40 held a combination Eagle Scout Court of Honor ceremony for Sanjiv Sunderram (left), Anish Sankla and Akash Iyer at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church last month. Aadhar Pant, Bryan Roy, Danny Huang and Eric Liu were honored simultaneously at the First Presbyterian Church of Dutch Neck. For more coverage, turn to Page 4.
‘Support and comfort,’ post by post To Her, From Us blog aims for empowerment BY SAM SCIARROTTA
Being a teenage girl is hard. Being a teenage girl in the middle of a global pandemic is even harder. Carol Sun and Catherine Chu hope to make it a little easier. This summer, the High School South seniors cofounded To Her, From Us, an online community that sets
out to empower young women locally and across the country. The site features a blog, letter exchange platform, merchandise, fundraisers, social media accounts and more. “We are aiming to create an open platform for young women to love themselves and embrace their voices,” Chu said. “Whether this be participating in a letterresponse service with our audience, fundraising for female-empowering nonprofit organizations, or releasing a series of interviews and news-
letter articles about extraordinary women in the workforce, we hope to show girls that we are here for them and can hopefully inspire them to become actively involved in leadership.” Sun added that the group also hopes to tackle insecurities specific to young women. “We want to provide a platform for young women to voice their concerns about various topics such as body image, school or relationships and hopefully address some See HER, Page 7
In an atmosphere rife with misinformation and political divisiveness, confusing messages have spawned concerns about mail-in voting—a process that has proven safe and secure in the several states where it is now the norm. The western states of Utah, Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Colorado have for years conducted their elections entirely or mostly by mail-in ballot. New Jersey will join them for this year, after Gov. Phil Murphy issued Executive Order No. 177, mandating all active registered New Jersey voters receive a mail-in ballot with prepaid return postage for the Nov. 3 general election. This switch has not sat well with some, and disinformation about the process and safety of vote-at-home elections started to spread as a result. One piece of disinformation—one that could land voters in jail—came from President Donald Trump, who suggested to North Carolina citizens Sept. 2 that they vote twice, once by mail and once at the polls, to test the security of the system. Anyone who follows the president’s suggestion would be committing voter fraud, a third-degree crime that could lead to a felony conviction. Mercer County Executive Brian M. Hughes, in a Sept. 18 email, called Trump’s suggestion “absurd.” In the same
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email, Hughes offered reassurances about the safety of voting by mail. “Don’t be distracted by baseless claims that seek to undermine the voting process,” he wrote. “Studies have shown that voting fraud in the United States is extremely rare, and states where voting now is done almost entirely by mail are said to report very little fraud.” In fact, New Jersey compares signatures on mail-in ballots to those on file in the Statewide Voter Registration System. The Board of Elections also has processes in place to flag ballots for voters who are not registered, have passed away or do not live in the county or state. “So we can set those aside for investigation and if need be rejection,” Board of Elections chairman Anthony Francioso, a Republican, wrote in an email. Mercer County clerk Paula Sollami Covello, who is responsible for issuing voteby-mail ballots in the county, said there has never been an incidence of fraud in Mercer County involving vote-bymail. In fact, the number of voters who wish to permanently vote by mail has grown “markedly” in recent years, Sollami Covello said. Voting fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States, whether for mail-in ballots or otherwise. Conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, which maintains a database of fraudulent voting incidences, found 204 cases of fraudulent use of absentee ballots among the 250 million votes cast by-mail ballot nationally. Of these, 143 resulted in criminal See VOTE, Page 10