This election season has proven many things we used to only speculate upon: solid BLUE States are still blue; solid RED States are still red; the ‘battleground’ States were fairly obvious four years ago; news media are so deep in the tank for the Democrats, they should issue pom poms; Democrats are so pissed about losing in 2016, there simply are no options beneath them to try to win now; hatred for Donald Trump is a living, breathing thing. We get it. But I wonder if maybe this election, because we are ALL tuned into it, and because it is SO CLOSE, has revealed something completely unexpected. This intense scrutiny, maybe for the very first time, has caused me to ask: are we so big, can we NOT cheat? Let’s dig.
We are well past the happy, wonderful past days of our founding. Back then, there were severe limits upon who could register to vote, and who could actually cast a ballot. Land-owning White males were the only folks deemed fit to elect our representatives! There was some logic wrapped up in this method: land-owners had skin in the game; they could be traced to a single address, not transient; they were not very plentiful; they were knowledgeable about the subjects they were voting on; they most likely helped fight the recent Revolutionary War. Now, ladies, minorities, renters, and such, before you build the gallows specifically for this writer, note that I said SOME logic. Over the last 240+ years, necessary corrections were made. Via the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, former slaves and other Blacks were preemptively given the right to vote (took nearly 100 years to make that into reality, but yeah); the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote.
But back in the day, the cities, towns, and hamlets were small enough in voting population, any discrepancy was noticeable. If you only had 12 people in town that fit the requirements, but 20 ‘people’ registered to vote, the error was obvious—someone is rule-bending, somewhere. And when one or more of those eligible died or moved away, it was another noticeable event. Retaining the numbers at the pre-death or pre-move level would’ve been quite obvious to anyone looking.
Fast forward to 2020. We now have a population upwards of 330 MILLION people! And we are a transient society. Very few people stay in one location for their whole lives. People register to vote where they used to live, followed by a new address, and so on, until they register at their current address. But what happened to the old, supposedly expired registrations? In many areas, applying for a driver’s license automatically registers a person to vote. But some of those same places allow non-citizens to apply for those same driver’s licenses, yet they are not eligible to vote! Next quandary: what happens when someone formerly registered to vote, dies? Yes, it is a tragedy for the friends and family, but what happens to that old voter registration?
A new monkey wrench has been thrown into this already huge process: mail-in voting. Prior to this year, only a few sparsely populated States (OR, WA, etc.) have had mail-in as their primary method of voting. Absentee ballots, for those deployed in the military, or otherwise unavailable to attend in person, required filling out an application, stipulating who they were, and where they were registered to vote. Now, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, many States went to large-scale mail-in ballots—many without the verification process of the Absentee system. In many areas, ballots were mailed to whatever population was on the voter rolls (those same rolls that have not been maintained for those that moved away or died)! The most secure method of voting is easily in-person, where each person must validate who they are, but now that method may be the minority method used.
Now for size: 148 MILLION+ votes were cast! At least that’s how many ballots were COUNTED. I have no idea how that number correlates to actual voter registrations, or voters that actually were alive and voted only once! Given the circumstances outlined above, how could ANYONE verify such large numbers? And wouldn’t the lure be unavoidable to find a way to take advantage of all avenues, legal or otherwise, to increase your party’s vote totals, especially KNOWING they were not easily verifiable?
Remember the ANGER of the Democrats, after losing the 2016 election? In law, they call that ‘motive’. But back to the title of this writing: are we too BIG to audit? Are we too transient to clean up our voter rolls? Can we at least remove the DEAD from said rolls? Or is the system purposefully opaque? Is it a feature of that system, not a bug, that NO ONE can verify anything about it? We take for granted that there is likely a bit of fraud inherent in the system, but what if it was MOSTLY fraud? How the Hell would we know? Let’s just say that we can’t count on our ‘watchdog media’ to keep things legit—media has even less trust than the election system. Heck, I would think it would be important enough to devise as bullet-proof a system as possible, but I’m not a politician—they may dig things EXACTLY as they are, for EXACTLY the reasons we would fix, if given the opportunity. The inmates are not likely to want to fix the broken locks on the prison (or asylum) gates.
