I’ve been thinking about our election process for a good long time. I started writing my blog a few months before the 2020 elections. I initially started posting on Facebook, but once they started filtering my posts, I decided it was time to get off Facebook and on to a platform where I have more freedom to say what I want.
One of the first posts I made on Facebook was about the security, or lack thereof, of mail-in-voting. I was told by one of my “friends” that it was totally secure. In reply, I gave him six or seven ways just off the top of my head that fraud-by-mail could occur.
One was that I could intercept the ballots at my mailbox and cast votes on behalf of all voters in the household. Another was that I could accidentally have someone else’s ballot delivered to my house and I could fill that one out and mail it in. Yet another is that I could simply throw away someone else’s ballot.
There are other easy examples but the gist of it is that it’s easy to commit voter fraud when all I have to do is get my hands on someone else’s ballot. Which is easy to do because the United States Post Office delivers mail to the wrong person every day.
I routinely get mail intended for my neighbor and vice versa. Extend that to the entire country and it’s mind-boggling how many people are getting mail intended for someone else. It would be unreasonable to believe that the Post Office would somehow magically be better at their job when delivering ballots.
I took a lot of grief from some of my “friends” (though they’ve long since unfriended me). They said that mail-in-voting was one of the most secure forms of voting and that the signature verification process would eliminate voter fraud.
Then election day came and went. We all saw the videos of people illegally stuffing ballots into the drop boxes. Don’t worry, I was assured by my “friends”, the signature verification will stop any voter fraud.
If only that were so.
Later we found out that voting precincts across the country started dialing back the accuracy of signature verification. Many precincts disabled it entirely.
So, the thing that my “friends” were counting on to ensure the integrity of our election process was turned off. On purpose. And not one of those people counting on signature verification raised a fuss when it wasn’t used.
Voting by mail is, in my opinion, so susceptible to fraud that it’s nearly impossible to secure. It should be immediately banned across the entire U.S.
Of course, I could easily commit voter fraud by voting in person too. Nobody checks my ID so they don’t really know if I’m who I say I am. I could vote on behalf of my next-door neighbor, who I knew was out of town and wouldn’t be voting. And they’d never know. Or, I could vote on behalf of my son, who hasn’t lived here for 10 years and is still on the list of qualified voters. And they’d never know.
And, I could claim I identify as a woman and vote using any female’s name too. They can’t ask me to provide an ID because they’re not asking anyone for an ID. And, they’d have to ignore the fact that I have a beard and am claiming to be someone named “Stephanie” because doing anything else would be profiling. And that’s wrong.
Now, you and I and any other rational person believe that everyone should get only one vote. We also believe that voter fraud is bad. And we know that one of the primary causes of voter fraud is someone voting more than once.
So, logic would bring us to the conclusion that the best way to prevent voter fraud is to prevent people from voting more than once. And the best way to do that is to require a voter ID.
It’s been nearly two years since the 2020 election. Since then, the Democrats have been working tirelessly to enact more voting laws. But the laws they’re enacting will only serve to make our voting process even less secure than it already is. For some reason, they’re absolutely against the one thing that could eliminate about half of all voting fraud.
The Democrats will quickly say that if even a single person is unable to exercise their right to vote, that’s one person too many. OK. Let’s for the sake of argument give them that. Everyone should be allowed to vote. But, if someone doesn’t have an ID, they can’t vote. So, the Democrat’s solution is to not use voter IDs at all, because not everyone has one.
Maybe it’s just me but it seems that the better solution would be to simply make sure that everyone has a voter ID. If you can mobilize a small army to harvest ballots from nursing homes, then clearly you have the ability to help those same people get an identification.
Requiring a voter ID is just one part. Because IDs can be faked. So, we should adopt the same technique used in some other countries. When you vote, you dip your finger in some blue indelible ink to signify that you have cast your ballot. That, along with a voter ID and a pair of bolt cutters will go a long way to making sure that someone only votes once.
But let’s say that someone returns to a polling place to vote a second, or third, or fourth time. Fine. Let them. But, before they can vote, we need to make sure that their fingers aren’t blue. That’s where the bolt cutters come in to play. I’d be more than willing to allow someone to vote a second time. All they have to do is let us remove their blue finger.
That may not eliminate the problem entirely, but it will make sure that nobody votes more than ten times.
But having a voter ID and a blue finger is still only part of the solution.
I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely no faith that my vote is going to be counted accurately. Maybe I did a couple years ago, but with all the evidence of shenanigans we saw with miscounted votes and outright data manipulation, I can’t know for sure if how I intended to vote was how my vote was tallied.
Once I leave the polling place, I have no visibility into what happens with my vote. I don’t know if it was counted and, if it was counted, I don’t know if it was counted correctly.
So, let’s put a couple more safeguards in place. This is straight out of Data Integrity 101.
Every ballot should have a ballot number. When you vote, you enter your voter ID (more likely, you’ll just swipe it like a credit card). Your voter ID is matched to a specific ballot. Before you leave the polling place, you’re provided with an official receipt. That receipt is a human-readable piece of paper showing your voter ID, the ballot ID and how you voted on every issue. Don’t worry about the receipt being too large, if CVS can do this, so can the government.
OK. So, now you have a receipt. What can you do with it? That’s step 2.
Step 2 is where we finally put to rest, or wake up entirely, the rumors of ballots being lost, Sharpie bleed-through or votes being changed.
To do that, we build a website where you can go to view how your vote was tallied. There could even be an app for that. You enter in the ballot number, and you can see the results. The results you see should match what’s on your receipt. If they don’t, your vote was miscounted. If you can’t see your vote, then it wasn’t counted at all.
Next, the results of every ballot should be available for analysis by pretty much anyone who wants it. All they’ll have is the ballot number, date, where it was cast and the votes on the ballot. So, they won’t be able to identify anyone, but they can tally the votes.
And, whoever gets the data will have to provide everyone with a way to review their ballot information to verify that it’s still accurate. That will make sure that the data provided to third parties for independent analysis is the same as what was used to determine the results of the election. Making the data publicly available, and independently verifiable, will eliminate the possibility of behind-the-scenes manipulation of people’s votes.
It’s not that hard people. This isn’t rocket science and we’re not inventing anything new. Everything I’ve described can be done with technology that has existed for more than 20 years.
This is a no-lose scenario. If votes weren’t miscounted, this will prove it. If ballots weren’t lost, this will prove that too. This would also remove any doubt about “hanging chads”. It’s amazing that this vote-validation process wasn’t put in place back in 2001. Because the technology was already there.
So, why don’t we already have something like this?
The first problem is funding. This obviously isn’t going to be free. But I have an idea for that too. We should be paying less attention to keeping taxpayers honest and more attention to keeping the government honest.
How about if instead of hiring 87,000 new IRS employees, we throw some of that money toward ensuring the integrity of our election process? Because if the government is going to spend that money anyway, they may as well spend it on something we need.
The second problem is that it’s unlikely that any politician would support the implementation of a system that allows people to validate their vote. But it’s a good idea, right? It’s hard to come up with reasons why we shouldn’t do this.
But I can think of one. Maybe the reason why the government doesn’t give you visibility into how your vote was counted is because they don’t want you to see.
