Is there sufficient evidence of fraud for courts to overturn the results that one or more states reported for the 2020 presidential election?
While that may be the question the law requires President Trump's legal team to address, it's the wrong question for America.
Those of us able to apply common sense and logic untethered to legal presumptions and requirements can ask a more basic question: Is our electoral system structured to provide free and fair elections? Anyone willing to take an honest look at the process understands that the answer is "no." The American election system is riddled with invitations for fraud.
According to the Constitution, we hold elections to determine which candidate commands greatest support among eligible voters choosing to express a preference at a designated time. Any activity capable of elevating a different candidate risks damaging that Constitutional system.
Does our current system serve its goal?
Though the Constitution calls for an election "day," votes are now cast over a period stretching more than six weeks. Each state enacts clear laws describing the availability of ballots, the rules for completing them, the ways in which they must be returned, and precise deadlines for their receipt. When state and county officials determine that circumstances render those clear laws inappropriate, they ignore them and feed their changes unevenly throughout the necessary training programs. Once the election is over, it's unclear how courts — or anyone else — can fix damage arising from improper and/or unevenly applied rules.
Ballots themselves are printed early, mailed and allowed to circulate without custodial oversight. Few if any states update and clean their voter rolls on a regular basis. Once the election is over, it's unclear how to undo any damage arising from ballots directed toward ineligible voters.
In the 2020 election, over half the ballots were placed in the mail weeks before election day. No one has any idea where those ballots traveled, in whose hands, between the time they enter the mail and the time they arrived back at the election board to be tallied. Once the election is over, it's unclear how to undo any damage arising from ballots diverted from legal pathways.
There are people who offer to assist others in completing their ballots, who collect ballots from others, and who assume responsibility for delivering those ballots appropriately — legally in some but not all states. Once the election is over, it's unclear how to undo any damage arising from improper "assistance," collection, or delivery of ballots.
When ballots arrive back at the elections board for tallying, officials apply minimal verification and validation needed to ensure that they were completed freely and legally to reflect the views of eligible voters. Little is done to enable error-checking and/or correction. Once the election is over, it's unclear how to undo any damage arising from the inclusion of untraceable improper ballots.
Some ballots arrive damaged or otherwise in need of correction or duplication. Officials and/or volunteers decide how and when to turn such a ballot into one suitable for inclusion in the tally. Sometimes they prepare their corrections without supervision and include their replacements in ways that preclude error detection and correction. Once the election is over, it's unclear how to undo any damage arising from the inclusion of improper replacements.
Much of this work is supposed to proceed only with multiple levels of scrutiny, typically including representatives of multiple candidates or parties. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn't. Once the election is over, it's unclear how to undo any damage arising from the exclusion of observers or other necessary participants.
The ballots deemed suitable for inclusion are then fed into a computer. Both the hardware and software used in the tallying contain proprietary components that are difficult to audit. Once the election is over, it's unclear how to undo any damage arising from problematic voting machine hardware or software.
Just to help things along, few if any jurisdictions require preserving paper trails or computers to accommodate potential challenges, lawsuits or research. In fact, few states even hold themselves to the same document retention policies they force upon all businesses operating within their borders.
Welcome to the United States in the 21st century. Every single step of our electoral process lacks security, oversight, redundancy, error-detection capabilities or suitable remedies. It's riddled with shortcomings whether or not anyone behaves inappropriately in any specific election.
Yet it's also a process in which the stakes are enormous, the incentives for impropriety are high, the likelihood of detection and prosecution are slim, and errors are rarely caught and corrected.
In other words, the entire American electoral system lacks structural credibility.
The question America should be asking itself is not why many people believe that the 2020 election was stolen. The question is how anyone could believe that a system structured to invite fraud at every turn nevertheless yielded an honest and accurate result.
Dr. Bruce Abramson is a Principal at JBB&A Strategies, a Director of the ACEK Fund, a founder of the American Restoration Institute and the author most recently of American Restoration: Winning the Second American Civil War. Read Bruce Abramson's Reports — More Here.
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