ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” article. It is an editorial by the editor.

Kudos to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson today for announcing that her office will make absentee mail-in ballot applications available to every registered voter in Michigan.

Benson’s move is smart and common sense for the August primary and November general elections during the awful health crisis that is the Coronavirus, or COVID-19. She is not requiring anyone to vote by mail, she merely is making it easy for everyone to do so.

I have long believed in the old saying that if you want people to do something, make it easy for them to do it. For example, if you want people to recycle, make it easy for them to do by providing curbside services.

Meanwhile, I’ve been seeing a lot of Facebook memes just like the one above that insist voters show up at the polls instead of by mail. Those who insist on this very simply are being played cynically by the Republican Party in a naked power grab.

The GOP for a long time has opposed efforts to make it easier for the unwashed masses to vote. Republican operatives long have maintained that the opportunity for fraud and getting ballots lost in the mail is too great.

Yet studies consistently over the years have determined that incidences of fraud are extremely rare, and instances cited by the GOP are anecdotal.

It’s so bad that several Republicans have been quoted as publicly stating that if a lot of people are allowed to vote, their candidates won’t win. The lower the turnout, the better the prospects for the GOP.

Studies show that reports of voter fraud that include collection and illegal use of ballots — like the case of the Republican operative in North Carolina who investigators said collected and tampered with absentee ballots in 2018 — but experts stress that the numbers are exceedingly rare.

One particularly extensive study found just 491 incidents of alleged absentee voter fraud among more than a decade of elections and 146 million registered voters.

Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah — already vote entirely by mail, sending a ballot to registered voters. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 21 other states allow some smaller elections, such as school board contests, to be conducted by mail. And they have the highest voter turnout percentages in the nation.

Election officials in the five mail voting states say they don’t have problems with fraud. And now in Michigan, we have a new law permitting absentee voting for no reason, after approval of more than two-thirds of the entire electorate in the November 2018 election.

I’ve lost patience with the quaint process of people having to miss part of a work day on a Tuesday to take time out to travel, show up, wait in line and cast their ballots at a designated place. The mail-in option is not only easier, but now with COVID-19, it’s a lot healthier.

To be sure, some clerks aren’t keen on the extra work involved with mail-in voting, but I can’t help but notice that in bygone days there were many more elections than four per year, which is the going rate in modern times.

Ladies and gentleman, despite my lifelong respect and admiration for Mark Twain, I think he was wrong when he said, “If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let you do it.”

The way I see it now, voting is the only power we average, workaday, unwashed common folks have in a country that purports itself to be a democracy but worships at the altar of rich corporations who bribe the men and women who make our laws.