There have been many accusations of ballot fraud since the polls closed in the recent US federal election — not helped by Joe Biden’s Kinsley gaffe about creating the “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics” — but that’s not the only thing holding up the process of determining who won say Jon Miltimore and Dan Sanchez:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Elections are a nasty business, but sometimes they can be clarifying.
We don’t yet know who won the US presidential election, and we may not for days or weeks to come. This stems largely from the ineptitude Americans witnessed on Election Tuesday.
It wasn’t just the fact that pollsters once again failed disastrously, or that networks fumbled their election coverage.
The bigger issue is that America’s governing bodies look incapable of managing something as simple as a vote, something Americans have managed to do efficiently for centuries without the benefit of computers, digital communication, and mass transportation.
As an American, I find this a tad embarrassing. As the journalist Glenn Greenwald observed Wednesday, countries with far fewer resources and less advanced technology regularly manage to hold speedy, efficient elections. This is something the US failed to do on Tuesday, Greenwald noted.
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The most prosperous country in the world cannot manage to do something as simple as collect and count ballots. Think about that for just a moment.
Unfortunately, this incompetence carries consequences that are quite real. Americans are beginning to lose faith in the integrity of elections. I’m not just talking about voters in the fever swamps of Twitter.
Many impressive journalists, thinkers, and students of various political stripes have expressed alarm at what they witnessed in the last 24 hours.
There is no better system to enable fraud than the mail in system the Democrats demanded be used “due to covid”. Suspect voter rolls being used to shotgun ballots out to everyone just made things worse. On top of that we know through past court cases that ballot harvesting is a thing. Tie all this together with count observers being expelled, court orders required to get observers in to watch (but the damage was already done), blatantly ignoring court orders, “glitches” that always tend to run in one direction. All adds up to no confidence at all.
Elections are easy if you are not afraid of honesty. First, vote in person on election day, with proof of who you are and where you live. Second, allow advance polls on set dates with the same rules as voting day. And finally, absentee ballots only by request, with a reason. Assign notaries in every state to act as invigilators, they must validate the ballot, they must validate the voter, and they must return the ballot to the elections officials.
No matter who is declare the winner of the fiasco in the USA, they are poorer for the lessons they are learning about the systems allowed to be manipulated. And worse, the Democrats will never allow it to be fixed.
Comment by Dwayne — November 6, 2020 @ 23:38