In the 2016 presidential election, Russians created pro-Trump advertisements on Facebook and other locations. C202andidate Trump joked about Russians turning over Hillary Clinton’s lost emails. For the next four years, federal investigations ran and congressional hearings were held on a wide range of Russian issues. Other than getting president Trump out of office, one laudable goal was making our elections more secure. President Trump has been called an illegitimate president under the premise that he would not have won without Russian interference. 

In all presidential elections, fraudulent voting has been reported.  People cheat. The amount of cheating is like shoplifting or employee theft; it happens on a small enough scale that it rarely makes a significant difference. There are notable exceptions, perhaps such as the election of Senator Al Franken.

In the recent 2020 presidential election, the reports of highly questionable activity were widespread and far in excess of any prior election in well over one hundred years. Improper vote counting was recorded on video and other cheating was substantiated with hard, factual evidence, supplemented by thousands of sworn affidavits. Most of the claims were that votes cast were not legal, but the remedy the states chose to deal with the complaint came from the school of Scrooge McDuck, where possession is nine-tenths of the law. They recounted all the votes that had been cast, without reviewing the legality of the votes in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the outcome did not change. In the NFL, this would be like reviewing one second of footage where a pass was incomplete and failing to review the seconds before when the receiver was held.

According to a recent piece by Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist, a rapid analysis of voting records in Georgia showed the following: 

• 2,560 felons,
• 66,247 underage registrants,
• 2,423 people who were not on the state’s voter rolls,
• 4,926 voters who had registered in another state after they registered in Georgia, making them ineligible,
• 395 people who cast votes in another state for the same election,
• 15,700 voters who had filed national change of address forms without re-registering,
• 40,279 people who had moved counties without re-registering,
• 1,043 people who claimed the physical impossibility of a P.O. Box as their address,
• 98 people who registered after the deadline, and, among others,
• 10,315 people who were deceased on election day (8,718 of whom had been registered as dead before their votes were accepted).

Such a litany of findings demands an in depth review, but, unlike football, where the evidence is footage from a few high speed cameras, the amount of data is voluminous and an adequate review of such claims would take months to years. There were only six weeks between election and the electoral college vote to collect probative evidence. The list of other problematic issues in several other states is longer and more complicated. Statistical anomalies abound.

Courts rejected the claims by the Trump campaign, citing lack of evidence, which is understandable. Courts as well as William Barr opined that number of ballots provably in question were insufficient to reverse the outcome. The major caveat is that the absence of evidence cannot be construed as evidence of absence, particularly apropos when the collection of evidence was just starting. Unspoken is the expectation bias, the unwillingness to consider that hundreds of thousands of votes could be fraudulent. We want—no, we need—to have confidence that our democratic process works.

Cynically, I note that strict Democrat partisans claim that looking into suspicious activity in the 2020 election is unpatriotic and harmful to our republic. It seems that whoever wins an election does not want any review while those that lose, demand that no stone should remain unturned. I tire of the whole party first mentality that seems to exist on all sides. I would think that with complaints by Democrats of interference in 2016 and the claims by Republicans of mischief in the 2020 election, that there would be some bipartisan support for a review and reformation of our electoral processes. I am, as usual, disappointed with politicians.

As in football, the Trump team is forced this year to accept the call made and the loss that came with it, regardless of their accusations of cheating. However, in the off-season, a great deal of work is needed.

1. Purge and clean voter rolls in every district and state.  This is mandatory as there are millions of errors.
2. Investigate the voting irregularities and claims of cheating in the 2020 election with a goal of preventing mischief in future elections.
3. Return to in-person voting as the default. 
4. For other methods of voting, increase security measures to equal those of in-person voting. (If we can safely conduct banking and commerce on a smart phone, we should be able to vote with it securely.)
5. Ensure that state laws and regulations that affect elections for federal officers, such as president, senate and house, meet federal standards for fairness, security and voter eligibility.

The National Commission on Election Reform was formed after the problems with the 2000 presidential election. The report, datedAugust 2001, is anemic and vague. For example, it provides tables and data about signature verification in the various states but no data regarding the reliability of methods used to verify that a signature, or data that sheds any light on fraudulent voting by mail or ballot box versus in-person voting. The long report is what I have come to expect from the process followed and the people involved, dealing more with expanded access and not at all with security. We need data that deals directly with electoral veracity.

The goals should be to enable reasonable access for all eligible voters, to count all legal votes and not count any votes that are illegal by making fraud impossible. I’m not sure what road blocks Washington Republicans might erect but Washington Democrats typically contend that access is restricted, that some demographics are disenfranchised, that the voting age should be even lower, that anyone living inside our borders should vote, etc. However, we cannot afford to have another debacle of this magnitude where tens of millions of voters are fairly certain that the election was stolen and tens of millions of others have much less faith in the system. Lost faith is very difficult to restore. Ask a cheated-on spouse…and the cheater.

Millions of Democrats across the country maintained for four years that Mr. Trump was unfairly elected, stole the election with foreign interference, and was illegitimate. Here we are again, same chorus but a different verse, claiming that widespread cheating led to the election of Joe Biden. Failing to restore confidence in the democratic process could lead to catastrophic consequences for our nation. Washington, fix this!