My response to Our potentially catastrophic election mistake by Lessig
Lessig has written a good article, and threaded a difficult needle. He seems to feel that there was no election fraud in 2020 but given that his article was about that topic he did a good job writing it without inflaming liberals with Trump Derangement Syndrome. However, I do think it’s funny that we have to read and write articles about how it could happen when the truth is we know it did happen in 2020.
While his article is an interesting breakdown of some niche issues with verifying Electoral College electors, Lessig misses the fundamental issue plaguing our elections: That Democrats in every state are doing their utmost to make it impossible to be certain that a vote was fair. If you can’t have confidence in the vote itself, then it will not matter how the Electoral College goes. One side will always have latitude to say the vote was stolen.
In this case, it’s clear that the 2020 election had many, many suspicious voting practices, but if even one wants to deny that as most people who hate Donald Trump will do, there are a few common sense things that would fix our voting:
1. Voter ID. If you aren’t a citizen, you don’t vote.
2. Voting happens on polling day. No early or late voting.
3. Voting happens in-person. Mail-in ballots for overseas military only.
4. Polling day is made a Federal holiday. No more “I couldn’t make it to the polls” excuses that are used to justify looser voting timelines.
5. Upon death, a citizen’s name is immediately scrubbed from voter rolls and their closest family members are provided a certified form proving that they were removed.
6. Votes are tallied and publicly announced on polling day, with criminal or civil liability if they are not.
7. Voting is done on paper ballots with serialized, physical copies taken by citizens as receipts in the case that a vote is challenged or to correct for cases of fraud.
This is all just common sense. In any other context than voting we would consider our current practices a breeding ground for fraud. If this were a race in the athletic sense we’d never let a runner have a head start, or to let the judges hide the clock and take a few hours to decide who won. More time to vote, more time to count votes, no cleaning of rolls, that ability to vote without showing up in person or to do so without providing proof of who you are — all of these are opportunities to cheat. Of course, that’s clearly intentional, however there are people who can’t see it because politics makes them stupid.
Some of these fixes are simply how voting used to work and we need to bring those back. Some of them are just things that seem obvious. I’m constantly surprised that we don’t get a carbon copy of our completed ballot (item 7) and as far as I know we never have. This bothered me particularly during the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections where the new digital ballot machines never even showed a physical copy of your vote. If, as I believe, the votes were manufactured, how can I even prove how I voted let alone a large-scale audit? We are in a terrible state in that respect. But one thing is true: Anyone who would argue against these basic voting guidelines really has no business advocating solutions for aspects of U.S. voting that occur after polling day.