The Patriot Post® · Fix Our Election Process Now

Six weeks out, the landscape is littered with electoral casualties: Donald Trump, the 74 million Americans who voted for him, mail-in balloting, even the very notion of Election Day.

But the most consequential casualty of all is our confidence in the system; our confidence that all legally cast votes will be counted and that all illegally cast votes will be flagged and rejected.

It’s gone. Kaput.

Democrats, we suppose, still have confidence in the system. But that’s only because their guy won. And because they count the ballots in the big cities. And because they don’t have to let those pesky Republican observers anywhere near them when they’re doing the counting. They can bully, they can intimidate, they can play the race card. They can do anything they want in Philly, in Detroit, in Milwaukee, in Atlanta. So, if you’re a Democrat, what’s not to like?

But if you’re a Republican, a conservative, or an independent, you ought to be concerned. Because your guy might never win another presidential election. After all, Trump won with 63 million votes in 2016. And though he got 74 million votes this time around, his utterly uninspiring opponent somehow got 81 million votes. Nothing like this has ever happened before, not in the history of our republic.

American elections have, all of a sudden, become really complicated. Really really complicated. And if Democrats have their way, they’re going to stay complicated. After all, the harder it is to understand a system, the easier it is for experts to rig that system.

Take the voting “irregularity” in Antrim County, Michigan. As the Washington Examiner reported back on November 5, “Trump won Antrim County over Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton 62% to 33% in 2016, a gap of about 4,000 votes. But on Wednesday morning, results out of Antrim County showed Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden leading the county by more than 3,000 votes with 98% of the results in.”

Fraud, right? Not so fast, they told us. Michigan Secretary of State and Dominion Voting Systems water-carrier Jocelyn Benson helpfully informs us that it’s an “isolated user error” that “does not affect election results” and “has no impact on other counties or states.”

Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos insisted in Michigan testimony that any problems were the result of “human error,” not technology malfunction or design.

If that weren’t reassuring enough, the Dominion website tells us that “disinformation is dangerous and threatens democracy.” Furthermore, the company tell us to “Get the facts” because it’s “setting the record straight.”

Whew. For a minute, there, we thought maybe something was amiss, and maybe Joe Biden didn’t get those 81 million votes on the up-and-up. Who’s this Russell Ramsland guy anyway, and what does he know about voting systems and cyber security?

Plenty, as it turns out. Ramsland has a Harvard MBA, he’s worked with NASA and MIT, and his company, Allied Security Operations Group, specializes in cyber security and forensic analysis, and has staff from the Pentagon, DHS, CIA, and Secret Service. So he and his company seem properly credentialed to have conducted an audit of Antrim County’s Dominion Voting equipment. Ramsland, though, is also a former Republican congressional candidate, and he seems to have gotten out over his skis with some of his earlier analysis. According to the Detroit Free Press, “Ramsland claims that Detroit saw a turnout of 139.29%. The city’s official results show that turnout in the city was actually 50.88% of registered voters.”

That’s a heck of a discrepancy. Who’s right? And how do we know? This brings us back to the question of confidence and how the Left has systematically destroyed it — because, after all, the Left destroys everything.

Mass mail-in balloting? Whose awful idea was that? The very thing that the rest of the civilized world has done away with due to the potential for fraud? Yep, it was enthusiastically embraced by the party of Biden. Look for Democrats to zealously defend it going forward. Look, too, for any voting-reform efforts led by Republicans to be met with fierce resistance. Stricter voter ID laws? An end to early voting? Tighter eligibility requirements and better signature verification processes for mail-in and absentee ballots? A fully transparent vote-counting process? Criminal consequences for election officials who restrict the access of vote-counting observers? Look for Democrats and their media lickspittles to label efforts like these as “undemocratic” and “racist” and “nothing more than an effort to suppress the vote.”

Our electoral system is straight-up broken. And in its broken state, it favors the Democrats. If we don’t find a way to reform it — a way to eliminate even the potential for fraud — we’re likely looking at a long stay in the presidential wilderness. As conservative commentator Mark Levin put it, “You can’t say, ‘We’ll fight them next time.’ There will be no next time; this has to be the time.”