Election Process Defects & Disenfranchisement

While political blabbermouths babble on about counting every vote, it's impossible

Prescott, AZ August 3, 2024… We have several major process defects in our election system all across the United States, and every one of them disenfranchises voters. While the political blabbermouth class yammers on saying, “we must count every vote,’ what they really mean with “every vote” is every vote regardless if the voter is legally permitted to vote or is an illegal casting a ballot. But that is a bit of a smoke screen.

There are 3 main classes of election process defects and the good news is they can be eliminated from the system writ large, it only takes political will and that is where the ascending populist movement plays a major role. Each class of defect disenfranchises tens of thousands of voters if not millions. Let’s not forget, that it is the Legislatures of the several states that set the time, place, and manner of elections under the federal Constitution. So, it is the Legislatures who must take action to repair the damage that they caused through adopting poorly thought-out election process legislation.

Mail-in Voting…

Despite warnings to state Legislatures about the risks and obvious security challenges of a mail-in ballot system, they adopted the schema wholesale. The Carter-Baker Commission of 2005 (former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker) specifically identified mail-in and absentee ballots as problematic, in part because of the broken chain of custody for handling ballots securely. The COVID-19 scare was used to justify even greater utilization of an obviously flawed system.

Moreover, there is a lack of certainty that every registered voter will receive their ballot in the mail. In a piece written by investigative journalist John Soloman with JustTheNews, he reported that “A US Postal Service audit of the 2024 primaries found ballots to voters were processed on time only on average of 97.01 percent, while voters' ballots returned to election counting centers were processed about 98.17% of the time.”¹

What’s worse is that Legislatures know this and do nothing to identify the root cause and correct the defect. Root-cause analysis would be a good tool for the political class to consider, but the political will must be there to act, and that is where the People come into play.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) failed to deliver political and election mail on time between 2% and 3% of the time during the 2024 primaries and the mail service’s chief watchdog warns in a new audit that some mailed ballots might be delayed or not counted in the November election because workers aren’t following required procedures.

Many voters have grown accustomed to the convenience factor of mail-in ballots. But if they knew that there was a possibility their vote might not count, they would be outraged. Add to that, mail-in ballots that are turned in late slow the counting process to a snail’s pace, and are often the reason that election results reporting can take days if not weeks.

There are two pathways to vote-by-mail, the outbound mailing and the return. If the voter never gets the ballot to vote, they are disenfranchised. If the ballot they mail back is not received for counting, they are disenfranchised. In both cases, not every vote is counted.

Many jurisdictions provide an alternative to mail-in voting, which is in-person delivery to the county clerk or elections office that ultimately collects the ballots for counting. Overall, ballots returned by voters “were processed on time only on an average of 97.01 percent of the time, while ballots returned to election counting centers were processed about 98.17% of the time,” the IG reported.

The National Conference of State Legislatures says that eight states, (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington and the District of Columbia) allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail; two states, (Nebraska and North Dakota) permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail; nine states, (Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming) allow specific small elections to be conducted by mail; and four states, (Idaho, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New Mexico) permit mostly-mail elections for certain small jurisdictions.

There is a technological fix for the problem. We already have highly secure ATMs for depositing checks and cash and dispensing cash. They use positive ID, a camera to tie the person to the deposit, place a date and time stamp on checks, and are extremely secure. By reconfiguring the machine intake slot for ballot-sized envelopes, and reprograming the machine software to identify a voter registration card or government ID, a jurisdiction could vastly expand local ballot collection with quasi-supervised polling stations. Is there a cost? Of course, the cost-benefit analysis is likely to reveal major savings in operation as well as a significant increase in security, all while protecting the privacy of the anonymous vote.

Machine tabulation…

Legislatures were sold a bill of goods when the machine tabulation vendors rolled into town like the Music Man. The reference is to the 1962 movie, The Music Man which follows a fast-talking traveling salesman, Harold Hill, as he cons the people of River City, Iowa, into buying instruments and uniforms for a boys' band that he vows to organize – this, even though he doesn't know a trombone from a treble clef.

Computer tabulation software developer and subject matter expert Clint Curtis, has testified in front of many legislative bodies that machines are virtually impossible to secure. And, to find discrepancies one must compare the machine tabulation with the paper ballots run through the system.² Furthermore, Clint has testified that to verify there is no nefarious “vote flipping software” embedded in the system, “You would have to view the source code.”