The Chinavirus (COVID-19) social distancing recommendations has encouraged voting rights and "elections experts" to propose alternatives to in-person voting. Michelle Obama co-chairs a "nonpartisan" voting initiative called When We All Vote that wants Americans to have greater access to voting by mail, early in-person voting and online voter registration. President Donald Trump argues that mail-in voting risks “tremendous potential for fraud” and hands a competitive advantage to Democrats.
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators."
US Constitution Article One, Section 4, Clause 1
The US constitution gives the responsibility of setting an election day to Congress but it explicitly states that the "Day shall be the same throughout the United States" in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 4. The notion of having a single day to cast and tally votes makes sense for anyone interested in maintaining a free and fair election. A staggered number of election days for different states would skew the vote and spoil the democratic process. With early voting and absentee ballots we are already a long way down the dirt road of election anarchy.
Democracy is not a perfect system for choosing a nation's leadership. Winston Churchill famously quipped that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” and American democracy proves the aphorism true. From the country's founding voting rights have slowly expanded from a relatively small group of landowning freemen to a broad universal suffrage that includes everybody. Some voting rights advocates are pushing to expand the franchise to the far edge of inclusion by allowing convicted felons and non-citizens the "civil right" to cast a ballot. Their conviction to a certain vision of democracy begs the question: would these modern day elections experts hesitate to mail in a ballot from an undocumented worker with a US address or a wrongly convicted, in their view, fellon given the opportunity to do so? The answer is no.
When We All Vote wants to expand access to vote-by-mail claiming it might be the only safe and secure option for millions of Americans isolated due to the Chinavirus. There are those unfortunates living under state orders to stay at home during the pandemic and they are being encouraged to request, receive and return mail-in ballots using free or prepaid postage. So this voting rights group wants Americans to pay the postage for extending the polling booth to every mailbox and the consequent shenanigans which will certainly result from this effort.
Currently Colorado (D), Hawaii (D), Oregon (D), Washington (D) and Utah (R) conduct all elections entirely by mail and everyone in these states knows which party will win the election months before ballots are counted. States that elect Mazie Hirono and Mitt Romney to the US Senate don't need to hold elections because they're "mailing it in" for real.There are 21 other states with mail in ballots for smaller elections (School Board, county supervisor, etc) and Forty states, including the five with all-mail elections, and the District of Columbia offer in-person early voting.
Early voting started slowly in the early 1990"s but by 2012 approximately one third of all votes cast in America were cast outside of a polling booth on the first Tuesday in November. An unpleasant reality of this process is that someone, somewhere must tabulate these mail in and "early" votes and that "someone" then has a huge sample to feed into an Artificial Intelligence algorithm and tabulate the winner of the election. Anyone who wonders why Mitt Romney stopped campaigning during the last week of the 2012 election or why John Podesta cancelled Hillary's fireworks celebration on the night of her "shocking" 2016 loss need look no further than early voting prognostication for their answer.
So why more mail in ballots? A blockchain based application tied to a citizens social security number and verified by Two Factor Authentication could identify the legitimacy of the voter's identity. Then a Public-Key Authentication process would allow an anonymous vote for a foolproof and legitimate election. Banks and Wall Street traders use financial software that manages billions of transaction worth trillions of dollars every day so It would be easy to create a system to handle 120 million votes on one day in November. It's not even high tech because these kinds of secure transactional messaging systems have been in operation for over 30 years. But mail in ballots allow political operatives the opportunity to harvest, lose or find the votes they need to win elections.
Politician don't cheat to win elections but the political consultants, amoral staff and dirty tricks operatives who live deep in the bowels of the DNC and RNC political parties and their dingy state based cousins do cheat. They do whatever it takes to win and that includes finding the mail in ballots of the dead, the sick, the psychotic, the lazy, the drug addled and the disinterested and mailing the vote in for them. It includes tossing some ballots with "unpleasant" votes in the trash or finding boxes of "good" votes that got lost in the post office. These villains will cite studies claiming that there is no voter fraud and their stenographers in the Fake News will echo this dishonest propaganda but none of their denials are true. They want mail in ballots because it's easier for them to cheat and fix election results if everyone votes by mail.
Washington State elected Gov. Jay Inslee so it's lost and elections, early or on time, don't matter much but there are still states with vibrant two party systems that wrestle with ideas and hold honest political discourse. Those states that are still authentically democratic need to have legitimate and fair elections where free citizens can cast a ballot at their community polling station along with their family, friends and neighbors. There is no more "essential" action for We the People to engage in than voting and that includes courageously facing the fears of a Chinavirus.
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