Fraud? Not so fast there

If I were black or Hispanic or poor and thus required by my everyday struggle to be much less politically engaged—and if I lived in Florida or Georgia—my vote for Stacey Abrams for governor or Bill Nelson for senator might not have been counted or even cast.

First of all, my fifth-grade teacher— her name was Judy Hankins, and she had a boy named Randy who would come to be called Craig O’Neill—just hauled off one day and declared that I was no longer Johnny, but John. Names can be such fleeting things.

The point is that my birth certificate says I am Johnny Ray and my voter registration says I am John Ray.

Georgia just canceled thousands of voter registrations on that very kind of inconsistency.

My only problem was applying for Medicare this year. The federal government called and asked who I was— Johnny Brummett or

John Brummett—and whether I could prove it. I ran over to the Health Department and bought a fistful of birth certificates and headed to the Federal Building where the guy asked if I was the newspaper columnist. I thought it was a trick question and declined to answer.

I got it worked out expeditiously, because I had the time and wherewithal.

Another thing: My handwriting once was legible, but now I can’t even read the letters I’ve put in crossword puzzle boxes. I’m forever going back to the clue to see what it was I wrote so I can proceed with the intersecting word.

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In Florida, they arbitrarily threw out thousands of votes cast by mail because it seemed to some clerk that the signature on the mailed ballot didn’t match a signature on file.

A woman in Florida with the surname of Rodriguez—not to suggest that might have been a factor—told

The New York Times that she was notified election eve that her mailed ballot would not be counted. Her failing, she was told, was that her signature on the ballot didn’t look like a signature on file.

She high-tailed it to the election commission office the next morning to find that the signature to which her ballot signature had been compared was a digital signing at the driver’s license office.

She’d sought to vote by mail only because there were 13 ballot issues and she wanted time to read them.

Donald Trump has been calling such indignities forgeries and frauds, even as judges have been granting usually insufficient relief. For example, Florida voters having their mailed ballots rejected by the arbitrary judgment of a suspicious handwriting difference were given until Saturday to (1) become aware that their votes had been rejected, and (2) get to a person of appropriate authority to make an appeal, and (3) submit an acceptable proof of certain identity.

Historically, persons most victimized by these injustices have been the poor, the disadvantaged, minorities and low-income people who can’t hop over to the Health Department and then down to the Federal Building to repair misunderstandings with dispatch.

By demographic cross-tabulation and historical record, we know that more rejected votes are for Democrats than Republicans. That’s why Republicans throw out votes. It is why Democrats count votes.

So when an emerging Democratic presidential aspirant such as U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio declares that the only way Stacey Abrams won’t become governor of Georgia is if “they steal it from her,” he overstates only in the margin, not at the essence.

The secretary of state and Republican nominee who beat her for governor—supposedly—oversaw the pre-election purging of thousands of voters on mismatched records, like Johnny Ray and John Ray.

That secretary of state, now resigned because he’s put himself in as governor-elect, stands in custody of 50.3 percent of the vote. But if Abrams could get more provisional votes counted, and if she could get her share of the votes of people who were purged, then her total might rise just enough to drop the former secretary of state below 50 percent, in which case she and he would proceed to a runoff.

Brown overstated in assuming she’d win the runoff. But I think he’s right she’d be in a runoff if her Republican opponent hadn’t purged voters whose nameforms or addresses weren’t pristine.

People move. People get called Robert and Bobby, Richard and Rick, Margaret and Peggy, Johnny Ray and John R.

That doesn’t mean that the great American democratic experiment should pass those people by.

Fairness and modernism—that’s all that’s needed.

There’s no reason to be eyeballing signatures for arbitrary judgments while the digital revolution rages. There’s no call to assume a vote is a fraud until proven valid.

And there’s no call for a president to be as full of it as this one.