As Republican chief election officials, we care deeply about the integrity of our elections. It should be easy to vote and hard to cheat.
Americans heading to the polls should know their vote will count. The system is working. Still, in recent days, bad actors have flooded social media with false allegations of election irregularities in several states, including ours. The cases we highlight indicate a widespread problem: Foreign adversaries, including Russia, China, and Iran, and domestic arsonists are trying to turn Americans against each other, destroying trust in our electoral process.
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First, we ask Americans to be skeptical of randomly sourced claims of election tampering. They often urge observers to believe something that our senses otherwise would find suspect. Overwhelming and desensitizing our ability to think and convincing us to assume the worst is the point of this malign activity.
Second, no election is perfect. Mistakes happen, and acknowledging them is necessary for transparency and trust. A polling station in Pennsylvania, for example, erred last week by closing prematurely. In response, a judge extended the period for voters to apply for mail-ballot applications in person. In Michigan, one noncitizen college student was discovered to have voted. In Colorado, the secretary of state’s office mistakenly exposed passwords to voting machines—an error that couldn’t be exploited because the machines aren’t connected to the internet and are accessible only by officials.
Walter Russell Mead is correct: “Politicians Aren’t What Make America Great.” A slice:
Our country’s division between a feckless and decadent establishment and a ragged, intellectually shaky populist insurgency doesn’t point to an easy way forward. And while we have had bitterly fought elections in the past, the grace that led Richard Nixon to concede in 1960 and Al Gore to give way 40 years later seems in perilously short supply. In my gloomiest hours I fear we are past choosing between the lesser of evils and are trying instead to discern which is the more survivable of two looming catastrophes.
But when I look back at almost 250 years of American independence, I feel better. We’ve had pretty rotten political leadership for much of our history. Neither Tippecanoe nor Tyler left much in the way of enduring policy accomplishments. The tombs of Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur aren’t disturbed by throngs of pilgrims come to venerate their inspirational historical legacies. We’ve often been the bad kid in civics class. When Tammany Hall handed out Christmas turkeys to loyal supporters and votes were openly bought and sold at courthouses across the land, the world did not look to American democracy as a model of wise or rational governance. In no other country on earth could something called the Know Nothing Party become a significant political force.
One might think that this completely predictable confluence of fiscal issues would be a major focus of the campaign, but it has not been. Neither candidate has any plan to substantively deal with these issues, decisions on which will need to be made next year, whether they like the thought of that or not.
This ‘mother of all fiscal cliffs’ could blow a $5trn hole in the US economy just to keep current law in place. Making matters worse for the US fiscal situation, the first year of a new administration is generally a time when presidents want to spend more to reward their various voting blocs for electing them. So not only is no candidate promising fiscal rectitude, but the political winds will be at the president’s back to spend more on new initiatives next year.
Here’s Jon Miltimore on Rachel Cohen on individuals and political action.
