[DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with any political party or organization. I am an American.]
DISCLAIMER: I wrote a earlier post about the potential for election fraud. I did not then, nor am I now, suggesting that any fraud actually occurred. In that post, I noted that the most secure voting system requires in-person voting with photo ID and the retention of the original ballots as marked by the voter. Anything else introduces the possibility for fraud to occur.
It's simply amazing how much misinformation about our election system has become common knowledge, thanks to social media and the Internet. Many of the misconceptions arise from the fact that we are not a single country, but a Union of independent states. Within the framework of the US Constitution, every state has the right to do their own thing as they see fit. Each has a Governor and State Legislature that write the laws for the state, including the laws governing how to conduct an election.
Article I, Section 4:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof;
Each state can conduct elections in whatever manner their legislature deems appropriate. Note that this clause does not apply to presidential or vice-presidential elections. That's covered in another article and section.
Article II, Section 1:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
Like Article I, Section 4, it specifies that only the legislative assembly of each state may make changes to their voting laws. No other entity, including any Secretary of Elections, can make those changes.
Therein lies the rub, as they say.
If the person in charge of your elections says that you can cast your vote within some specific time-frame, and you follow the rules and properly do so, it seems unfair that your vote may be disallowed under state law. The person in charge of your elections misled you and gave you bad information, so why should you have to pay by being disenfranchised?
Every state has different methods of collecting the will of the People. In Maricopa County in Arizona, for example, the voters mark bubbles on a sheet that is then fed into a tabulating machine. When the tabulations are complete, the totals are physically removed and transferred to another facility where they are totted up together. The original ballots are retained for 22 months. Mail-in ballots must bear a proper signature and be sealed properly and received by a certain deadline.
Since the 2020 election, these ballots have been recounted several times, with each recount confirming the totals. However, they have never been forensically audited. The difference in an audit and a recount has been blurred and a substantial number of people seem to think they are the same thing.
They are not.
Your check register may show that you have $100 in your checking account. You've added up the numbers three separate times and you've got $100. You write a check for $75 and it bounces because you forgot to enter a check you wrote for $50. Your recount produced a fraudulent result, while an audit of your check register, accounting for every check, would have told you that you only have $50 in your account. [Most people reading this probably have no clue what a check register is and leave all of that tedious arithmetic to an app or their bank. My apologies.]
A proper forensic audit of an election would involve checking every ballot. This was done before in 2000 when punch-cards in Florida were examined to try and ascertain the intent of the voter. Maybe they meant to vote for someone else; or maybe not. It took a ruling from the US Supreme Court to overturn the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court which had approved a recount that was not authorized by the state legislature's election law. (See Article II, Section 1).
Twenty years later, the ballots in Maricopa County, some 2.1 million of them, are being examined for possible fraudulent activity. Again, the possibility of fraud does not prove that fraud existed. However, if it did, the forensic audit is being conducted to look for the different means by which that might have been accomplished. It is likely that some anomalies will turn up, but not in any significant amount. With 2.1 million ballots, statistically speaking, there should be some outliers. On the other hand, if massive fraud did in fact occur, the audit may prove that as well.
This was my 13th Presidential Election. Sometimes I vote for the winner, and sometimes I vote for the loser. But I accept the results of the elections until proven otherwise.
Hillary said it best, I think. We are stronger together!
