Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up the morning after the next presidential election and say: “You know, I trust the integrity of our electoral system 10,000%. My guy lost fair and square; your candidate won, so let’s move on. Let them govern this great nation until the next election rolls around.”?
“The Leftist Resistance” truly believed Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 Trump/Hillary election. The Trump campaign and his supporters are challenging vote totals in at least five states in this not-yet-fully-completed election.
Here’s the problem: our national electoral system is a hodge-podge of methods of casting and counting ballots that can vary widely from county-to-county, city-to-city, state-to-state. North Carolina has boards of elections in 100 counties choosing their own separate voting methods and machines. There is no integrated statewide or national platform that handles each vote the same way.
Most elections are decided by such wide margins that no one really cares if a tiny fraction of votes were cast incorrectly or tabulated the wrong way. Many elections are decided in primaries where one side or the other has gerrymandered districts to their advantage — and you can rest assured there are at least as many grotesquely gerrymandered Republican districts as Democratic seats across the nation.
No one reports or investigates improprieties in such elections or files a lawsuit. It is those close elections where human error, computer glitches and outright fraud make a difference and mean something in the final vote.
A huge difference.
To those who assert, “There is no voter fraud anywhere, ever!”, google “Bladen County, 2018. McCrae Dowless.” That was a massive case of voter fraud that occurred only two years ago in eastern North Carolina. It negated a congressional election where over 280,000 people in the Ninth Congressional District had their votes invalidated and a special election had to be held last year, 2019, to finally elect Dan Bishop to serve in Congress.
When 280,000 votes can be disenfranchised by fraudulent votes in the 21st century, it is time for a change. A major change.
Your cell phone is a GPS gold mine for professional political operatives.
Advanced computer, cell phone and data mining technology are already being utilized in our elections today — except voters hardly know it. If you have voted in any of the last four elections, political consultants and pollsters know you very well. They know your name, telephone number, home address, political party affiliation, what kind of beer, wine or whiskey you drink and what type of cars you buy, simply by downloading publicly available voter registration data and matching it with data gleaned from aggregators, who get it from Google, Twitter or any number of online sources.
Your cell phone is a GPS gold mine for professional political operatives. They know how many times per month you attend church, the opera or play golf — and target you with tailored personalized political messages to get you to vote for their candidate instead of the other one.
If you are not registered to vote, never fear. No political person is tracking your purchases or behavior for electoral purposes because you can’t legally vote.
We have such advanced computer technology today that, when coupled with sophisticated encryption and security systems, online banking, commerce and legal business transactions are conducted over the internet in ways that could not have been imagined a decade ago.
New technology also proves promising, such as blockchain voting. Blockchain is the technology upon which crypto currencies, such as Bitcoin, are built. This technology, which could be augmented by verification techniques such as fingerprint identification, promises to be the most secure way of voting in the near future.
Regardless of the process, in 2020, with the advent of modern technology where credit card companies and banks can digitally track every penny on the planet in an instant, it seems reasonable to ask for the same with our most sacred right — the right to vote.
Elon Musk can land a rocket booster upon re-entry on a concrete postage stamp in the middle of the ocean. Surely someone like him can devise a fool-proof electoral system America can adopt before 2024 and remove all doubt about future winners and losers in every election.