When considering elections and the process and results of voting, it is not difficult to find published, verified instances of hacking, attacks on election processes, voter fraud, and outright manipulation of voting results. Various locations in the U.S. are notable for machines that produce results in elections that are favorable to those already in power, whether elected or appointed. Various state actors including Russia, North Korea, and China are constantly in the news for attempting to influence the outcome of American elections.
Those that interfere with elections do so for one of two reasons: either to gain new powers or consolidate existing power through the government, or to disrupt government powers. This could include those in power that are benefitting from illegal arrangements such as bid-rigging, using the power of office for personal gain, or to illegally grant favors to those who assist their particular agenda.
Whatever the reason, the most effective and powerful way to resist and eliminate voter fraud is through clean, fair, open and honest elections. One reason democracies and republics are such effective forms of government is that when elections are fair, open and honest, it is easier to ensure the type of government that the majority of citizens desire.
Without fair, open and honest elections, disenfranchised citizens end up remain victims of an unfair process, and will often resort to violence in order to attempt to change their circumstances – or leave the place that denies them a fair opportunity to have a say in their affairs. Another option is voter apathy where people don’t vote because they simply think it doesn’t matter. History and current events reveal the folly of strongarm tactics that benefit a minority in power- those institutions crumble, fail and ultimately create misery for their citizens.
For prosperity to thrive, citizens must be secure in their property and person, without undue threats and arbitrary deprivation of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Those that engage in voter fraud are directly attacking this security. In order to identify and prevent attacks on our constitutional rights, our voting processes must be rigorous and well maintained.
What does this look like? What is the Gold Standard for clean, fair, open and honest elections? First, the right to vote must be as rigorously defended and cared for as every other right and benefit of citizenship. This means that registering to vote, and participating in the vote, requires viable and valid government identification, such as a birth certificate, driver’s license or passport or other government-issued ID card.
It also means that the voter rolls are regularly purged of those who have passed on or moved, and that they are checked against a national database of voters to ensure no one is registered in more than one location.
Lastly, it means the use of paper ballots and risk-limited audits for all elections. The design, storage and issuance of paper ballots must be carefully monitored and maintained, and the paper ballots must be securely stored until all election results are completed. All of these processes need to be transparent to the public by allowing public access to the process like poll watchers.
There is no mystery or confusion about this. Although there are a few legitimate reasons to use mail-in ballots, it is critical that those reasons are limited to the practicality of specific voter’s needs, such as service in the military or a physical limitation, and that those ballots are tightly controlled and carefully accounted for. The newer, machine and technology-driven processes that ignore or replace these Gold Standard processes instead of supporting them are an attack on the voting security, and by extension, exist only to create opportunity for voter fraud.
Every person, organization or rogue state bent on manipulating voting or election results seek vulnerabilities in the process to manipulate- can non-citizens register to vote; can people register more than once, can they vote more than once, can vote-by-mail ballots be harvested and sent in with predetermined votes, can mail-in ballots be lost or destroyed, can the voting machines be hacked, can the results be changed, and on and on.
By using time-proven processes, and sticking with the gold standard practices, opportunities for voter fraud or electoral manipulation on a broad scale are extremely limited. By giving every citizen the right to vote with proper ID and cross-checking, using paper ballots and risk-limited audits, and ensuring the security of the ballots every step of the way, we can, as citizens, make our votes count and participate in our government while knowing we are voting in fair, open and honest elections.
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