(UnitedVoice.com) – The first US presidential election was in 1788. You’d think we’d be pretty good at it by now, after all that practice. It’s true that, for a couple of centuries, our elections did get better, with a gradual move towards universal adult enfranchisement. But, somehow, since the turn of the century, it seems we suddenly can’t do it anymore. What can we learn from the 2020 election?
- We use too many machines. From this year’s biased Dominion vote-scanning machines designed to rig an election to the pathetic “hanging chad” farce in 2000, the machines we use to “help” with elections let us down time after time. Experts are debating how to make the machines better – but why do we need them at all? In the UK, they mark their ballots with a pencil and count them by hand. They don’t have rigged or disputed elections.
We’ve rounded up the top five takeaways from 2020 on how to protect future elections from cyberattacks and technical failures. https://t.co/gy1HL57jwh
— Brennan Center (@BrennanCenter) December 19, 2020
- We’ve added too much complexity. Elections used to be simple. A small minority who couldn’t make it to the polling station got to vote by mail; everyone else voted in person on the first Tuesday after November 1. This year, more than 100 million people – almost two-thirds of those who voted – filled in their ballots up to a month in advance either in person or they returned them by mail or in drop-off boxes. The result was chaos, with thousands of ballots lost, delayed or stuffed into boxes by party activists.
- It’s not a vote; it’s a lottery. When and how you can turn in your ballot, and what happens to it after you do, depends on where you live. Key battleground states changed their electoral laws right before the election, in ways that probably affected the results. We need consistency or, at least, minimum standards.
Our election system is too complex. Complexity creates opportunities for things to go wrong – or be rigged. And this massive, complex, vulnerable system is run by the careerist politicians and bureaucrats that make up the infamous government swamp. America deserves better.
Copyright 2020, UnitedVoice.com
