The Democracy depends on a Secret Ballot. If it’s possible for anyone to know how you voted, then your election is not democratic. Why? Because voters could be, for example, bribed or threatened (or both). Actually, this is happening all over the world today, in developing economies and dictatorships alike.†
In the US, we have the framework of a good election system, but it has serious vulnerabilities — not the least of which is the expectation of good faith from elected officials and from public candidates for office. Our system assumes they won’t mislead the voters about important facts (although it allows for ‘creative marketing’). Worse, the mechanisms for accountability are weak and in some cases utterly toothless against determined adversaries of responsible public governance. Look, we get it: some people prefer to have a King, even though George Washington, known as the Father of our Country, refused to be crowned and set the precedent for the ‘orderly transition of power’ we’re all hoping for in November. We’ll need all the luck we can get, folks.
Here’s the thing: Ballot fraud is a statistically insignificant problem, especially compared to the wholesale manipulation of millions of voters by corporate mass media infotainment marketed as “news”. Government Leaders who really want a secure/fair election, tend to focus on that problem, not on the distraction of so-called “voter fraud” (which semantically suggests blaming people, not a broken system).
But some leaders — and we can say all three branches of Government have a part in this problem — do not seem to want really free and very fair elections, conducted securely so that we count one vote for every eligible voting citizen. Some want a process they can control so they get the results they want. Does it get more anti-democratic than the Electoral College? The EC distorts the one-person-one-vote promise of American Democracy using an ingrown sixth-toe holdover artifact from a Monarchy. It’s high time our lawmakers listened to the political scientists and removed the Electoral College. More on that later.
To be more specific, a lot of elected politicians from every stripe of the rainbow pursue the results they’re paid to get. Large corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals run things by flooding the halls of power with money. This has been going on since before there were Pharoahs: “He who pays the Piper calls the Tune” is a very ancient adage. These days, the shorthand is “Citizens United”.
In addition to distracting you with nonsense about voter fraud — which effectively blames you for the terrible outcomes of our elections — they’re hard at work disenfranchising large numbers of voters from even being able to vote, using socioeconmic levers and culture-war tools. All this complaining about ‘woke-ness’ and I’ve yet to hear that concept clearly defined.
Why? Because the shadow forces hire technical consultants who know how people are likely to vote and knowing to a statistical certainty that large numbers of people won’t vote the way you want them to means those beople need to be removed from the voter rolls. So, they cook up all kinds of crazy reasons why peoples’ voter registrations should be removed, making it very difficult for them to even be able to cast a ballot.
Along with tactics to disenfranchise voters and to raise fears of disenfranchisement in others, they bombard people with “suspicions” about the security of the ballotting process.
But: don’t look at the other hand, which is grabbing fistfuls of money from corporate lobbyists to turn the Government into a monster that ignores the vast majority of people and what they want. Oh, no. Look at the shiny red ball instead. Let’s call that ball something scary, like “voter fraud” and blow it out of all proportion.
Let’s not actually FIX anything while we hammer on the sour note of “fraud” endlessly. Let’s claim dead people voted over and over until lots of uninformed voters — many with a single information source and more than a few who struggle with numbers or distrust scientific investigations into problem (because previous lobbyists successfully kicked the props out from under the educational system) — are convinced that a handful of people who vote twice or assumed a dead relative’s identity (literally a few hundred votes over hundreds of millions of votes cast in the last few decades) are “stealing” election. Sure, shoplifting and pickpockets are a nuisance but they are candles in the blackness of space next to the supernova of corruption and criminality in the military-industrial-congressional sphere.
~VoterX, Fall 2020
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† For more info, visit the Secret Ballot Project website, our sister project through the CIPHR thinktank.