The Patriot Post® · In Brief: How to Talk to Your Neighbor About Election Integrity
If you haven’t noticed, it’s an election year. After the debacle in 2020, it’s worth asking some questions about election integrity, but thanks to Leftmedia misinformation, your friends and neighbors may think you’re an “election denier” for talking about it. Yet roughly a third of voters are not confident in the 2024 election. Fortunately, Elle Purnell has some advice, boiled down to articulating five basic points.
Chaos Is Bad
Confusion creates opportunities for both intentional and unintentional wrongdoing. Lax policies that make it more likely election officials don’t know who a voter is, where he lives, whether he is eligible to vote, or even whether he has already voted invite chaos and undermine order. Bad actors can more easily take advantage of bad election laws, and innocent Americans can also unknowingly err when the rules aren’t clear and precise.
When ballot traffickers dump piles of ballots they’ve supposedly collected from individual voters into unsupervised ballot boxes, it complicates each ballot’s chain of custody. When voter registration forms are automatically and indiscriminately mailed, including to people who aren’t eligible to vote, it creates room for error or misuse. When voter rolls are bloated and never cleaned, it makes elections messier and therefore less secure.
Illegitimate Votes Cancel Out Legal Votes
If the right to vote is sacred, that surely includes a voter’s right to know his vote will count. But when laws are bent or relaxed to allow votes that shouldn’t be counted, those votes dilute the votes of legal Americans. …
If Someone’s Vote Is Going to Cancel Out Yours, He Should Verify He Is Eligible to Vote
To avoid these illegitimate votes, some sort of verification process is required. Because people often lie, documentary evidence is generally the best way to prove a person really is who he says he is. That’s why voter ID is popular. …
No One Else Should Be Responsible for Your Act of Self-Governance
There was a time when voters went to their polling place on Election Day, received a ballot, filled it out with a pen, and turned it in. These voters didn’t worry that their ballots might get lost, stolen, or delayed in the mail, or rejected for a missing signature or date. They didn’t worry about a ballot in their name that they never requested being automatically sent to whatever new resident might now live at their old address. They didn’t entrust their ballots to political operatives who go house-to-house and collect voters’ ballots by the bundle.
This process also required voters to take some kind of responsibility for their roles in governing themselves. You had to be invested enough that you remembered to vote and got to the polls (or requested an absentee ballot). You might even have had to register to vote instead of being registered automatically. Voting was a more intentional affair than filling out a customer service survey on your phone. …
Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant
When media outlets mock or belittle voters’ sincere concerns about election integrity, you should wonder why they don’t want you asking any questions. When bureaucrats refuse to turn over voter rolls to good government groups, or when political operatives drag private citizens who raise concerns about election administration into court, what are they trying to hide or silence? …
A good indicator that something is being hidden is the fact that someone is trying to hide it.