Legitimacy of our elections is a critical issue facing our country
We can make sure that our elections, going forward, meet the ideals we espouse of free, fair and open.
Free and fair elections are the foundation of our form of government. The president’s concerns about fraudulent voting, and other questions about the last election, have undermined citizens’ faith in our democracy. All of these questions and concerns still should be addressed.
Many agree with the president that the possibility of a tainted election should be investigated. Many may disagree over the scope of the investigation, and who will be doing the investigating. Multiple votes, noncitizen votes, identity theft votes are criminal, whether significant in number or not; inaccurate voter rolls are concerning. Of equal or greater concern to the health of our system are tampering with voting machines and vote counts, not recording each vote cast on paper backup in case of technological failure, foreign countries and Justice Department officials manipulating the information available to voters to influence the outcome of the election, and parties in power trying to remain in power by tailoring districts, registration rules or voting opportunities to override the one citizen, one vote rule.
What can we do now? We can make sure that our elections, going forward, meet the ideals we espouse of free, fair and open.
Let the branches of government work together to appoint a bipartisan advisory panel to investigate voting processes in the United States, with the stated purpose of suggesting, to states and localities, policies, procedures and safeguards that assure trustworthy election results at every level of our political system.
To avoid charges of partisanship and corruption, this task cannot be in the hands of people who have personal, political or economic missions — that is, people who may run for office or benefit from those in office. To have the Justice Department and the politicians implicated in tainting the election investigate, as would normally be routine, is unacceptable in this case.
Instead, select the advisory panel with equal representation from each major political party from our prior presidents, prior vice presidents and our Supreme Court justices — who have proven their patriotism through service beyond politics, demonstrated their efforts to uphold the Constitution, and who would not to run for governmental office again.
Questions about the legitimacy of our elections are the most critical facing our country; failure to address all of the concerns, thereby accepting a rigged political arena, would be to abandon our founders’ ideals — abandoning, in consequence, the idea of the United States of America.