Chap sent me a thought provoking article on the state of voting in the United States. Thanks, GW. Here are the thoughts it provoked in the engine of your Big Red Car:
1. One person. One vote. Verify the person. Authenticate the vote.
This line above is what honest people want as it relates to American elections.
If someone argues that any of those four tenets are erroneous, be suspicious. It is basic stuff like cornbread.
2. Low tech elections — paper ballots with identification verification are the surest way to ensure the accuracy and honesty of our elections.
3. We check, doublecheck, and re-check most tech applications for everything except for voting wherein we have a hodgepodge of black box, proprietary machines, with closed source software which are difficult to operate and which for some unknown reason we don’t believe cyber security experts when they tell us they are easy as pie to hack.
Buyers of these machines trust the sellers’ tech folks. It is nuts.
4. Both sides of the political spectrum have been critical of the reliability of the machines for decades. They are a self-inflicted wound.
5. Somehow the requirement for a voter to establish his or her identity on the certified voter rolls with a photo ID or a Voter Registration Card (which is issued solely for this purpose when you register to vote) has become racist.
This, of course, is total baloney.
6. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with mail-in ballots as long as to obtain one a voter has to establish their identity with an ID just like at the polling place and the ballots are verified as authentic (watermark, number — any system like you would use with a financial check).
7. The counting of ballots has to be transparent and bi-partisan.
A Democrat or Republican county apparatus cannot assign its own apparatchiks and exclude the other party from involvement if we want to have elections that are not questioned as to fairness and accuracy.
8. Polling place vote count integrity must be maintained. [As an Election Judge in Texas when my polling place closes, I know within a few minutes the outcomes from three different sources.]
9. The Russians cannot hack paper ballots.
COVID threw us off the straight and narrow in the 2020 election, we adopted some dodgy practices (unmanned voter drop off boxes, unverified mail in ballots, plus a lot more), and we need to get back to basics to prevent even the appearance of voter fraud.
If we focus solely on the real objective — honest, transparent, verifiable elections — we will rebuild trust within the electorate, trust between the parties, political legitimacy, and strengthen our representative republic.
Reforming our political culture, our toxic political culture, starts with free and fair elections.
One person. One Vote. Verify the person. Authenticate the vote.
Low tech, paper ballots.
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car and an honest citizen of the greatest country in the world.
Solid comfort food basics: meat loaf, cheesy mac, corn, stuffing, and cornbread. That’s the way our elections should taste. Stewarts orange cream. You in?