Chester County voters must be assured election process is valid

Imagine you are the administrator of the only hospital in your county. You receive notice that, during an operation today, the lights repeatedly flickered, the suction machine stopped working, the anesthesia was ineffective, instruments went missing, and a nurse or surgeon may have erred in their work.

Fortunately, although not always following the standard of care, you are told that everyone worked together and the surgery was completed with no obvious harm to the patient. The patient has been informed and is visibly upset. They go on to express that they have lost trust in the hospital and may never use it again.

What would you do if you were given these sets of facts? I doubt anyone would move on as if nothing had happened. To do so would be gross negligence. Rather, you would immediately contact the patient and express your sincere apologies for the unacceptable proceedings and assure them that a full investigation is being undertaken looking to identify all mechanical, process, and human errors. Only upon conducting such an investigation and remedying all shortcomings, would there be any hope of restoring confidence in the institution.

We have just come through an election in which a multitude of problems were encountered including machine mutilated ballots “cured” with tape, defective thumb drives that failed to upload votes, mismatching counts, and a bag of ballots mysteriously “appearing” days after the election.

We are grateful to Voter Services and the Democrat and Republican solicitors for working hard in an attempt to rectify the problems. But we mustn’t stop there. To do so would be gross negligence. Damage has been done. Confidence has understandably been lost.

Some recently appearing op-eds have suggested that those requesting an investigation are “conspiracy theorists.” This is ill-informed, irrational, and insulting.

One mistake is too many when it comes to protecting each sacred vote. To make certain this never happens again and voters’ trust is restored, a full investigation must be initiated.

We are grateful that at the Board of Elections meeting on Nov. 22, the Commissioners unanimously acknowledged the magnitude of the problems that occurred during this past election. We thank Marian Moskowitz, Chair of the Commissioners, for directing Robert Kagel, County Administrator, to “proceed with the plan” to bring all parties together in December and formulate a proposal to investigate these problems, with the assistance of an outside firm.

We look forward to working with the Commissioners, Voter Services, the Chester County Democratic Committee, and the Libertarian Party, to ensure that these errors are never repeated and our county once again represents the standard of excellence for which it has been known.

Eck