The wheels of justice turn slowly, as the saying goes. That seems to be particularly true in Connecticut. As you may recall, the mayoral election in Bridgeport, Connecticut last year was so riddled with election fraud involving mass mail-in voting that a judge ordered both the primary and general elections to be rerun. That wasn't the city's first run-in with that sort of cheating. During the 2019 elections, other allegations of "mishandling" absentee ballots were raised, leading to a police investigation. But this week, long after the dust had allegedly settled, arrests were finally made in these cases. Bridgeport Democratic Town Committee Vice Chair Wanda Geter-Pataky and City Council Member Alfredo Castillo were charged with unlawful possession of absentee ballots and other election law violations. Two campaign workers - also Democrats - were also charged.

A Democratic Party official involved in a voting scandal that caused a judge to order a rerun of last year’s mayoral election in Connecticut’s largest city was arrested Tuesday and has been charged along with a city council member and two campaign workers with mishandling absentee ballots during a different election in 2019.

Bridgeport Democratic Town Committee Vice Chairperson Wanda Geter-Pataky, City Council Member Alfredo Castillo and the two campaign workers were each charged with unlawful possession of absentee ballots and other violations of elections law.

All four are accused of manipulating the absentee ballot system during the city’s 2019 Democratic primary, in which the incumbent mayor backed by the town committee, Joe Ganim, defeated state Sen. Marilyn Moore by just 270 votes.

If Wanda Geter-Pataky looks familiar to you, that's because you may have seen her here before. She's the woman who was caught on a security camera stuffing large numbers of ballots into a drop box during last year's mayoral elections. (There's nothing suspicious about that at all, right?) The group is alleged to have done far more than stuffing ballot boxes, however. The charges describe incidents of the arrestees misleading voters about their eligibility to vote, instructing people which candidates to vote for, and being improperly present while ballots were being filled out. Two of the four Democrats, campaign workers Nilsa Heredia and Josephine Edmonds, were further charged with tampering with a witness during the investigation.

Mishandling or improper execution of an absentee ballot in Connecticut is a class D felony. Witness tampering is also a class D felony punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a fine not to exceed $5,000. First offenders rarely receive the maximum sentence, but when you are hit with multiple counts covering two different election cycles, they might decide to throw the book at you. They are all due back in court on June 24, so this case appears to be moving along quickly.

Keep in mind that all of this was going on over the course of two consecutive election cycles. Bridgeport is almost entirely controlled by Democrats, so this hanky-panky was showing up in the primary races. If that's what they're willing to do to each other, just imagine what they would do to Republicans. Connecticut moved to mass mail-in voting as soon as the pandemic struck, as did so many other states. And no sooner did they make that decision than people showed up and started taking advantage of it to commit election fraud. These are just the people who managed to get caught. How many others are there out there who were more careful in their cheating and went undetected?

Mass mail-in voting might have been at least somewhat defensible in the early stages of the pandemic when so many people were locked down and we were (falsely) told that we needed to engage in "social distancing," including when going to crowded areas like polling places. But the pandemic is behind us and life has largely returned to normal. Mass mail-in voting should be left behind as well, so why do so many Democrats in blue states continue to insist on using it? You may rest assured there is a reason for that and it has nothing to do with improved access to the polls.