It’s only 61 days until the election, and in reality even less given early balloting. It’s going to be a “wild ride” that will probably go well into January. For now I want to focus on just one piece of the larger picture and that is ballot security.
I came across an article in Tablet, Broken Ballots, which compares our electoral system to that of Somaliland and let’s just say we don’t even meet Third World standards.
It’s a good read in general and his line “The new American voting system is practically calibrated to produce mistrust, and to create broad segments of public opinion that believe the whole thing is fake—regardless of who wins” hits the nail squarely on the head.
However there is one point that sticks out, one that I have been pushing for the past four years, which states:
“Unlike Somalilanders, most Americans no longer have to physically show up at a polling place to vote. Instead they have the choice of filling out and submitting their ballots beyond the observation of election officials, which means there is no assurance that the people in whose names ballots are cast actually signed—or saw—their ballots, voted free of duress or the promise of some benefit, or are even still alive.”
Bingo. Down to the last letter.
We’ve had problems with ballots and ballot security before 2016. There were accusations of fraud with electronic voting machines in Ohio in 2004 which led to objections by Democrats during the electoral vote count. Then of course there was the problem in 2000 in Florida with the “hanging chads.”
What is lesser known was that after those problems, there was a bipartisan , private effort to reduce uncertainty in the electoral system and restore public trust. The Commission on Federal Electoral Reform, also known as the Carter-Baker Commission as it was chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III, published a report in September 2005 that was notable for two reasons.
The first was that it was an (to my knowledge the last) attempt on a bipartisan basis to address ballot access and integrity. Actually that sort of buries the lede because the Commission acknowledges that ballot integrity is both an ongoing and important issue, not something that can be dismissed out-of-hand as it is today as “denialism” or as a dog whistle for voter suppression. Trust must earned by positive measures, both by being built into the system and through active efforts in its ongoing operation. Integrity cannot be established by an argument of ignorance, as it is today, which states no problems exist because no problems have been proven.
Elections may be governed by law, but they are run as operational systems and their effectiveness must be judged as such and not by legal issues as in rules of a courtroom.
Second, the Report states that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” and goes on to concerns such as 3rd-party collection of ballots, ballots sent to wrong-addresses, and risks stemming from fraud and abuse. Sound familiar? This was almost 20 years ago.
The problem with our electoral system(s) today is that they for the most part do not treat each and every uncompleted ballot as the precious cargo that it is. If you go to a polling place to vote, the precinct official who checks you off the voter roll and hands you the ballot to complete at the polling place knows three things, that 1) a person with your name on the voting list received a ballot, 2) that person and only that person is completing that ballot, and doing so not under visible outside influence, and 3) that it is that voter who deposits the ballot into the ballot box.
You might be an illegal alien voting or claiming to be someone else, but that is another issue and can be resolved quite easily (given the will); for now we have just made the problem of electoral integrity much more manageable.
However with absentee ballots none of those safeguards are in place, especially with automatic absentee balloting. Once an uncompleted ballot leaves the supervision of a polling place, the chain of custody is broken. There is no guarantee that the person to whom the ballot is mailed will receive it, that the intended recipient even exists, or whether the person who completes it does so willingly or under duress. The opportunity for intimidation and fraud grows exponentially when there is both absentee balloting and ballot harvesting, that is when the completed ballot is given to a third party for delivery. Needless to say, the chances of authenticating absentee ballots, given the enormous number of ballots received, are about nil.
I should also add that once the idea of having both completed and uncompleted ballots present outside of a designated polling or election site is normalized, the chances of good old ballot stuffing rise dramatically.
In short, in a system of mass absentee balloting, it is not the voter that matters, so much as it is the number and possession of uncompleted ballots outside of polling places.
This is the evil engine built into the structure of our electoral system, and it can run in parallel with the legal aspects of the electoral system. But regardless whether those ballots are completed secretly by a legitimate voter or by some other means, once those ballots go into the box they are all treated the same.
When people talk about other ways of rigging the system, such as illegal aliens voting, these can integrated directly into the system. It is a work of evil genius in that it is efficient, largely indistinguishable from the legitimate side of the electoral system, and attacks on it are stiff-armed as “voter suppression.”
Stand back and admire its grandeur. Absentee balloting, when combined with ballot harvesting and an efficient ground game, is the Death Star of electoral politics. It truly is, in the words of a wise political sage, “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”
I don’t even bother to argue about voting fraud with most people, that just degenerates into “election denialism” arguments. I simply lay out the problems with absentee balloting and ballot harvesting and ask them to justify a system that bears all the hallmarks of racketeering and criminal negligence. The onus of proof is on them, not us.
There are simple solutions — which might be unfair to granny who cannot leave the house or the businessman who is travelling on election day, but complete fairness is impossible under any system. However, the individual human beings who would have to pass the laws to put those simple solutions in place were “elected” under the current untrustworthy system. They have absolutely no personal incentive to mess with the current system which gave them a highly-paid nearly-for-life job and access to massive amounts of grift & psychic satisfaction.
Revolution before economic collapse, or economic collapse followed by painful rebuilding. Those are the only ways we will see trust restored to the electoral system.
Most political commentators are desperately avoiding the one key point. If your political system’s and government’s legitimacy is based in elections, if the point is reached where the rational assumption by participants is that the elections have no integrity . . . then the political system and government have no legitimacy. If the government is regarded as having no legitimacy, then it’s acts will be eventually viewed as impositions and oppressions; not a carrying out of its basic functions.
Throughout known human history, people have used force and coercion as the normal basis of government and as the means of changing it. When you make nonviolent politics moot then the default is to violent politics. That is the cost of cheating for short term political gain.
Subotai Bahadur
Thank you for putting into words exactly what I’ve been trying to say for years now.
I like games. I love making and trying game systems. And part of that is how easily a game is to cheat or rig its systems. Ballots have become a high stakes game where all signs point to making cheating as easy as possible.
Indeed – once that a national government becomes illegitimate in the eyes of the governed … then all bets are off. At best, we have a sullen, disobliging “Irish democracy” where the national authorities are scorned and deliberately hampered at every turn.
At worst … something I really don’t want to think about – Kurt Schlicher’s “Split” in real life.
I voted absentee in Minnesota. I applied online, giving ID numbers (driver’s license or final4 SS). County officials verified that I was registered, and notified me that my application had been accepted. The ballot arrived by mail; I had to find a witness, show that person that the ballot was blank, mark it in his presence, place it in an un marked envelope, which was then placed in a second envelope which the witness signed and dated. That went into a third envelope, which I mailed.
Then the state went and spoiled it,, because a couple of weeks later, Minnesota mailed absentee ballots to everyone. Still, as far as I know the signing process was the same.
(In 2020, the witness-signing part was crossed out because of covid restrictions.)
I live in a senior residence, and this year, county officials came to campus with ballots for a session with residents and staff, in which residents filled out applications, the officials verified registrations (which they do online anyway), residents marked their ballots, had them witnessed (mostly by staff, who knew them), and delivered them directly to the officials.
That seems like an approach sensitive to the needs both of accessibility and security.
@Linda
The requirement for a witness in the case of an absentee ballot increases the chances of intimidation or falsification to me, regardless of the procedure used to distribute and collect ballots. As Mike points out, in an official polling place an observer can physically verify the voter and only the voter was the person who marked the ballot and did so with no outside influences (this is why you can take a voting selfie but not a picture of your marked ballot). The same is not true in the case of an absentee ballot. Even the inclusion of ‘election officials’ is highly dependent on how those officials are assigned.
That seems like an approach sensitive to the needs both of accessibility and security.
When I voted in person in Michigan my picture ID was scrutinized, my name was crossed off a list, and I had to fill out a little form and sign it. Then it turned out that in the city of Detroit poll workers were simply running ballots through the machine over and over again. And then in my last election there we got Dominion voting machines.
Don’t assume that because everything seems on the up and up to you that elections are in any way secure. They aren’t.
Let’s not ignore the opportunities presented by an excess of “democracy”.
In a benighted polity like the UK, the voter is presented with a list of candidates for the local Member of Parliament — choose one; that’s it! The Prime Minister is whoever happens to be the leader of the party with the most elected MPs — a system which makes the US Electoral College for President look like a model of representative democracy.
In a typical US election, the voter is faced with a long list of elected offices at national, state, and local levels, each with its own list of candidates, plus votes on recall of judges, bonds, constitutional amendments and who knows what else. The very complexity of the process of summing the votes for all the different elements on a single ballot provides a ripe environment for fraud.
There was a lot to be said for the earlier simpler Constitutional system of having State representatives chose Federal Senators and having a real Electoral College. But that was then and this is now.
Anyway, I recall long ago reading a biography of JFK. The vote fraud in Chicago that won him the election was mentioned, but as a sort of tinfoil event that probably didn’t happen. I presume the insiders knew all about it, but so far as I know that wasn’t transmitted to the public.
Much later, I discovered that at some point that fraud in 1960 had gone from crazy talk to just an assumed fact. Hmm. This was about the time John Fund wrote his book about fraud in America, which I didn’t bother to read.
Eventually we found that any time a Republican won an election it was assumed by the left to be vote fraud. Note Stacey Abrams never conceded her election defeat and has loudly been denying elections for years.
In 2016, as I mentioned above, poll workers in Detroit were caught running ballots through machines over and over again, which we know because of the recount requested by Jill Stein. We don’t know quite how much fraud there was because the GOP-led government quickly shut down the recount and ended any investigation.
And then came 2020. There were literally thousands of people willing to sign affidavits affirming fraud, videos of democrat poll workers covering up windows after they evicted GOP poll watchers, multiple states quit counting, etc, etc, etc. If you haven’t understood that there was massive fraud involved in that outcome, I feel bad for you.
2024. Huge fraud is assumed. Trump supporters are intensely peeved, and democrats only care about stopping Trump.
The point here is that vote fraud has grown from something nebulous with no discernible impact upon the public acceptance of election results into a cancer destroying the entire system.
We’re on a path to see one side or both simply refuse to accept results, perhaps as soon as this November.
This will not be good.
We’re on a path to see one side or both simply refuse to accept results, perhaps as soon as this November. This will not be good.
I think you’re exactly right. It’s not just Trump supporters who won’t accept in the face of election fraud, but Democrats won’t accept because it is Trump
> then the political system and government have no legitimacy.
They have the legitimacy of violence.
They control the police and the military. That is their legitimacy.