A Sense of Decency

Every American deserves to feel secure in their vote, to believe that their vote was counted and that it wasn’t “stolen” or lost.  It is the duty of government to ensure that our votes are counted honestly and fairly.  And is the duty of every American to aid in this process.

Personally, though I live on the US-Mexico border and know quite a few immigrants, I don’t think the occasional immigrant voting illegally—either maliciously or mistakenly—is really a large enough problem to worry about.  I’m sure that voter fraud occasionally takes place, but not to an extent that it changes the outcome of any election.  And though I think requiring voter identification is a solution in search of a real problem, the practice is all right with me if it will help reassure voters and can be accomplished without suppressing voter participation.  If requiring voter ID will increase voter confidence in the process, I’ll play along.

Voting machines have been shown to be far more accurate than any paper voting system.  Eliminating human math errors while tabulating results pretty much ensures better voting accuracy.  Extensive studies have been done on whether the machines are more accurate than paper ballots, and the machines always come out on top.  But, there appear to be a number of people who think that these machines are being hacked by little green men in spaceships or something—so if it will make everyone feel more secure—let’s use paper ballots until the technophobes get over their irrational fear of overgrown adding machines.

I’m sure that somewhere a mail-in ballot was used by a recently deceased family member to send in an illegal vote.  I do not believe that people have ever gone to graveyards and written down the names of dead people so they could be used for fraudulent voting purposes.  The whole idea is ludicrous—there wouldn’t be enough recently dead people still on the voting rolls to matter, and if you are just looking for made up names to register—there has to be a better way to make up names than wandering around a cemetery with a clipboard.  Computer generated lists of random names are within the means of anyone with moderate technical skills and the everyone else could just use out of town phone books available at any public library.

There have been countless studies done trying to find any real proof that dead people have voted in any significant numbers—and it simply hasn’t happened.  Though having said this, I can guarantee that someone will write me telling be about a cousin who had a friend whose first job on the police department of a small Southern town in New York was to write down the names on tombstones…  But, I am certain no one will write me with hard evidence about an actual case.  

America needs to rest assured that we still have the most honest, fair, and accurate elections possible.  There are occasional errors:  after all, in the last election, over 167 million people voted.  If the odds of an accident happening were only one in a million, then there statistically had to be occasional errors.  Errors that most likely balanced themselves out.

Relax, America.  We can live with this and work together to improve our elections.

But, we cannot fix the problem if high ranking election officials—And yes, I mean President Trump—seek to further their chances in a future election by trying to convince us that this last election was stolen.  Or is it simply the need to be the center of attention that forces the President to scream about a fraud that never was?

Creating serious doubt—unfounded and ludicrous doubt—about the accuracy of our electoral process is not only immoral, it is deliberately damaging to the foundations that our society is built on.  As Edward R. Murrow once said, “Accusations are not proof.”

Trying to convince the governor of Georgia to overthrow the results of the election, while technically legal, is a heinous act.  And it’s fairly stupid, too, since the governor does not have the legal right to do so.  (Something that the governor, to his credit, has wisely admitted publicly).

During the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly defamed an innocent, good man to make political points.  And, in a nation that had more than grown weary of the constant chaos of McCarthyism, a brave man, Joseph N. Welch, finally said publicly what so many had been thinking.  Joseph N. Welch spoke for all of America when he asked the senator, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

It is now time for someone, preferably in the Republican Party—a party long held hostage by a man who is obviously more concerned with himself than his country—to have another Road to Damascus moment and publicly denounce our president’s continued undermining of the democratic process.  

Mr. President, at long last, have you left no sense of decency?