Last week, as usual in the days leading up to the year’s end, media pundits offered their predictions for the year ahead. Their outlook was generally gloomy — there’s plenty to be worried about — and regarding the upcoming presidential election, most were downright fatalistic. It seems that we are doomed to relive the controversy and chaos of 2020, and possibly much worse.

A legitimate concern? Definitely. After all, it’s been over three years and we’re still flapping about the last one.

As I see it, the reasons for concern about 2024 are twofold:

1.) The wrong candidates.

The last thing our nation — and the free world — needs right now is a grudge match between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, neither of whom is the right person to lead this nation through the minefields ahead over the next four years.

Biden and Trump are mirror images, each driven by a personal desire to vanquish the other. Biden wants to be remembered as the two-term president who protected the nation from Trump dictatorship; Trump is consumed by revenge over the stolen election and his mistreatment since then.

Do we care about either ego trip? Elections are about the future, not the past, and neither Trump nor Biden has offered any basis for confidence that he is up to the challenges ahead.

2.) Inadequate election security.

Back in the good old days (eight years ago), American voters would go to the polls on Election Day, confirm their identity, and cast their votes. The relatively small minority unable to do so (because of illness, infirmity, overseas military service, etc.) would have requested absentee ballots and submitted them by mail. That night, we would know who had been elected and we would have reasonable confidence that the vote tally was correct.

The process we hatched in 2020 — ostensibly for COVID reasons, and now widely accepted — changed all that. The 2020 presidential election was the first time in history that a majority of voters did not cast their ballots in person on Election Day. Some 43% voted by mail, about twice as many as in the two previous presidential elections.

There is nothing inherently wrong with by-mail voting. Several states have shifted to all mail-in voting, and others are relaxing the restrictions on absentee voting. Many voters prefer its convenience, no doubt a factor in the continuing increase in voter turnout. The problem is that by-mail voting presents a wide range of opportunities for misuse or abuse.

In December, a Rasmussen poll examining the 2020 election found that over 20% of respondents who had voted by mail admitted to some form of illegality in doing so, such as filling out and/or signing a ballot for someone else or voting in a state not their permanent residence.

That’s a jaw-dropping number considering that the presidency was won that year by a margin of about 43,000 votes in three swing states — much less than 1% of the votes cast in those states. Did mail-in voter fraud change the election outcome? We’ll never know. But so much for the fiction that the 2020 election was the most secure ever.

The underlying issue is this: The reality that unsecure by-mail voting can affect election outcomes undermines public confidence in the entire system — and it opens the door to endless objection from the losing candidate, whether Republican or Democrat.

Absent a miracle or two, neither of these situations will be corrected before the election. And on both, it is important to recognize that this is the path that we — the citizens of this nation — have allowed to materialize. It’s a self-inflicted wound.

It remains to be seen whether Biden and Trump overcome their current difficulties and secure their party’s nominations. But the election is 10 months away, and the party primaries have not even started, so the voters still have a say. And there’s little doubt that massive by-mail voting is here to stay — which demands a concerted effort at the state level to put in place much better guardrails to prevent voter abuse.

Perhaps it seems misguided to fret too much right now about the always chaotic U.S. politics in the face of so many other serious problems, such as world peace (with hot wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and storm clouds over Taiwan), our porous border with unvetted migrants flooding the country, the breakdown in American society in so many ways (rampant incivility, violence, crime, disintegrating family, etc.), energy and environmental issues, and others.

I’d argue the opposite. With that mountain of imposing threats, nothing is more important right now than selecting a leader — via an election process we can trust — who can navigate us through it all.

It’s on us, American citizens. So let your voices be heard.