Jack of Harts

TLDR version: We depend on the recognition that Election Day is largely, free, fair, and honest. If new laws and practices shake that recognition, that will be very bad for all of us.

Full version:

Election Day is coming, and with it the rise of partisan political feelings, motives, and actions. As if we have not had enough of those in the last four years. I still believe that the majority of us wish the coming election to be free, fair, and honest. Not perhaps as many as those who professed such notions four years ago. I remember well the social media postings of those who said they may disagree but wished to be civil and friendly when it was done. And I think we all know many of those who posted such fine sentiments found out they did not mean them as much as perhaps they thought they did.

In the end though, I do believe that most of us wish free, fair, and honest elections. Florida is an example of a State that has come a long way from where they were two decades ago when everybody began wondering why “hanging chad” was so troubling. They now have new voting machines and one of the better developed absentee ballot systems in America, complete with very detailed rules on how to handle them. Ballots are only given out to those registered voters who ask for them, as is normal. But then they must be mailed several days before Election Day, or handed in personally ON Election Day. Their numbers are tabulated by the election boards in the week before Election Day, and announced with the vote totals at the end of Election Day. Only then are they opened and counted, and the numbers added to the final total in the hours that follow. It is a good system when followed, though as we all saw two years ago, it can run into trouble when election boards do not follow the law. Still, it is a good system that quickly found those who refused to follow the law, and actually removed them in at least one instance.

We have sent votes through the mail all my life, though I have never personally done it. I have voted early, but not absentee. Voting through the mail is simply not a major issue for most people, despite the charges from some that claim people don’t trust the same postal service that sends Social Security checks each month. Which it doesn’t. It stopped something like a decade ago. Social Security payments are now sent via direct deposit. The point is, that most people don’t have an issue with the mail, beyond the normal worry that delivery times can be amazingly elastic.

One true issue is with the voting rolls of registered voters. We all know they are wrong. There are more registered voters in some districts than people who live there. Some have moved away to another town. Others to another existence. Some have changed their names. Some simply their addresses. The ballot chain of custody is unclear and unverified in many States now starting to seek vote by mail in all cases, and the simple fact that many ballots will be sent to places where people do not live is sincerely troubling to most people.

Another issue is ballot harvesting, the act of taking votes from people with the promise to submit them. It is illegal in most states outside California. The chain of custody and the honesty of the custodians must be as short and honest as possible for people to truly trust the final result. And vote totals that change after Election Day are generally treated with great skepticism. I’ve seen enough winners on Election Day lose to the great absentee vote trail, or the boxes of votes showing up in car trunks, in the week that follows for a lifetime. And the fact that some States are baking that in from the beginning, by specifically saying that votes can be delivered as much as a week after Election Day, simply seems further designed to entangle the issue.

I do not wish to see that this year. Not anything like it. That is why I encourage absentee ballots for those who wish them, using the absentee ballot systems that nearly all States have. They are designed to do this. All we may need to do is hire more workers to do the work. The system is there. It is the grand overhaul of a voting system in the months before the election, to a system that has already utterly failed in New York to have any timely result, that I distrust. That the majority of us distrust.

We depend on the ballot box to freely, fairly, and honestly deal with the many differences we have as a nation. If most of us lose trust in the ballot box to be free, fair, and honest, then we enter perilous waters that most of us do not wish to see.