Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News last week.
Once again, a sizable percentage of the people are going to spend the next four years disbelieving the results of a presidential election. With an electorate divided so evenly that elections are decided by just a few thousand votes, even the appearance of impropriety sows doubt and undermines the stability of our republic. We must reform our election process to rebuild the confidence of the electorate that the results — whatever they may be — are an accurate reflection of the will of the people.
America’s voting laws have been continuously changed throughout our history and every state conducts its elections a little differently. The twin objectives of our electoral process are to make it as easy as possible for as many citizens as possible to vote while also ensuring the integrity of the process. The former objective is to encourage a large enough turnout of voters to capture the will of the majority. The latter objective is to ensure that that will is accurately recorded.
As we have leaned our electoral system in favor of convenience to encourage turnout, we have opened it to fraud and the appearance of fraud. When election results are overwhelming, a little fraud does not threaten the result. When elections are decided on the knife’s edge, a little fraud undermines our system of government. In a system of government that relies on the losers willingly accepting the rule of the winners, legitimacy is based on the people’s faith in the outcome.
While still encouraging as many citizens who want to vote to vote, Wisconsin should once again lead the nation in electoral reform by creating a system that is the pride of democracy.
First, mail-in voting should be restricted to people who must have them. Overseas soldiers, ex-pats, and home or institutionbound people need a way to securely exercise their franchise. For most of the people who voted by mail this past election, it was simply a convenience. The problem with mail-in ballots is that they are inherently insecure. They pass through too many hands and are susceptible to fraud or being lost (intentionally or not). Greatly restricting the use of mail-in ballots to the people who really need them will reduce actual and assumed fraud.
Second, Wisconsin must insist on paper ballots in all jurisdictions and secure all of them for a reasonable time after every election. Electronic systems are convenient for clerks, but they leave no paper record of a vote in the event of a challenge or discrepancy. The beauty of paper ballots is that if there is a problem, authorities can always pull out the actual ballots and count them by hand.
In conjunction with the paper ballots, no counting machine should ever be networked to anything. Ever. Anything that touches a network is subject to widescale hacking. Simple, standalone counting machines may be inconvenient, but it is impossible to tinker with them on a large scale without a widespread conspiracy with people touching every machine. Such widespread conspiracies are improbable and unlikely to go unnoticed.
Third, local districts must purge the voter rolls on a more frequent basis. Having our voting rolls cluttered with the names of people who are dead or have moved is a ripe field for fraud. The simplest way to keep the rolls more hygienic would be to purge names of people who have been identified as having moved and those who have not voted in two election cycles. Given that Wisconsinites can register again on Election Day if they find their names removed, it is a minor inconvenience for a handful of voters for the sake of electoral security.
Fourth, all of the counting and recounting should be live-streamed and recorded. Nothing pushes away fraud and builds confidence like transparency. Anyone who has seen the incredible detail and angles available to watch a poker game on television knows how easy it would be to show every ballot up close for all the world to see. If there is a legal challenge over the count, the archived video would be easily accessible.
All of these measures would help secure our elections and restore the people’s confidence in our elections. They should also be coupled with measures to expand options for voters to cast a secure ballot. For example, the state should expand and fund a uniform in-person early voting period throughout the state.
For our republic to survive, the integrity of our electoral system must be above reproach. It does not matter if 90% of the people allegedly turn out if a large contingent of Americans do not trust the results. A substantial number on the left have never trusted the results of the 2016 presidential election. It appears that a substantial number on the right will never trust the results of the 2020 election. We have to do better for 2024.
Electoral security requires honesty and integrity of those operating the process. The major urban areas are all but hopeless in that regard. They own the effin’ game and everyone knows it. Where you going to find the money to out-bid the bad actors here? How much does it cost to get people to do the right thing?
Aye, there’s the rub. O’Donnell is pulling the thread on ‘institution-bound’ people who are “voting”–curiously, like they were all Democrats–so there’s a methodology that must be developed. I’m thinking body-cams could be required.
When I lived in North Dakota, I worked at an institution for the severely physically and mentally disabled. The mental age of the residents ranged from less than a year to perhaps 3 years old, but mostly under a year.
The liberals came in a demanded and said they had a right to vote.
And vote they did but it was the aides filling out the ballots.
It had no implication for the bigger races but it made a big difference in the local elections.
They eventually closed the place down, so it doesn’t happen there.
But could it happen elsewhere?
My Spidey sense says of course it happens and it could flip elections.
The stage for distrust was set long before the election. the WEC’s refusal to scrub the registration lists of inactive voters guaranteed the problems and questioning of the legitimacy of the election we are now seeing in WI.
Not only in Wisconsin. And MORE than half the US population believes that this election was rigged– meaning the Democrat voters believe that, too.
>The stage for distrust was set long before the election. the WEC’s refusal to scrub the registration lists of inactive voters guaranteed the problems and questioning of the legitimacy of the election we are now seeing in WI.
The real trust issue comes from the Left who claim this purge might disenfranchise voters. Anyone who can rub more than two brain cells together knows that WI is a same day registration, meaning if you show up and you’re not registered, you can register and vote… and if you don’t have the needed paperwork to register you can provisionally vote and bring the paperwork at a later date. So the Left making that claim flies in the face of facts, and that it might impact a tiny fraction of a percentage incorrectly removed out of the already tiny fraction of a percentage that was removed from the Voter Rolls.
Additionally, the same Left Machina wants to stop any and all attempts to review and audit and authenticate votes after they have been counted. This is where distrust in the system comes from. It just happens to come this election from the Right because of who won. I remember the crying and moaning and caterwauling in 2016 from the other side. For some reason though it’s only ever the Right that wants to develop systemic ways and means to correct any processes that are perceived as weak or shady. I wonder why that is.
Heh, I would hazard a guess that it concerns the bases they represent. Conservatives generally believe the means justifies the end and are more apt to accept an answer if the proper means were followed. Progressives have learned that change is always considered ‘radical’ by the masses of the day because people naturally prefer stability to chaos. Thus for liberals the end is what is important (meaning their idea of what ‘better’ is) on any given issue. A little cheating to save one more child from…everything is worth it.