While many voters of diverse views and opinions stood in long lines to cast their votes, there were people on the other end of that process who were dedicated to not only ensuring the integrity of the vote, but doing so in a way that would reaffirm confidence in the voting process.
Indiana was not a battleground state and Hancock County was not an area of high visibility, so most of the effort here passed unnoticed just as it does in seemingly every election. We trust the process locally. We have every confidence that any failures here are simply the result of human error rather than a conspiracy to circumvent the will of the voters. It was those other unknown places that we didn’t trust and especially so as the media reported results that did not match what many of us expected or desired.
It also dragged on for multiple days while many questioned what was going on behind closed doors where votes were being counted.
It’s been decades since Chicago was the punchline in jokes about dead people voting, but that reputation still sticks. Are these concerns still valid in an age of electronic poll books and databases?
A 2016 report by CBS investigators found 119 verified dead residents of Chicago voted 229 times in the prior 10 years. That’s a fairly small number of ghost votes for a city of that size, and further investigation found that most of those ghosts were actually living voters who had identical or similar names.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization, has been tracking cases of voter fraud, and its database lists “1,285 proven instances of voter fraud” nationwide since 2003. A significant number of these cases are voter registration fraud similar to the case of former Indiana Secretary of State Charles White, who listed a different address than the one where he actually lived.
This should reaffirm confidence that the bi-partisan methods used to insure the integrity of the vote are doing the job intended.
But it’s not enough this time. When you don’t get the results you want and expect, it’s a reasonable response to want to take another look at the process, and the one most suspected of “fraud” this year was the usage of absentee/mail-in ballots.
Never mind that we’ve been voting this way for over a hundred years and have procedures in place to identify and address fraud; most of us never paid much attention to absentee voting/voting by mail and aren’t familiar with the existing safeguards. When our president spoke out against it, that added partisan fuel to the fire, with the result being that far more Democrats than Republicans requested absentee ballots.
This led to a result that anyone could have predicted if you knew — as many people didn’t — that some states restricted absentee ballot counting to begin on the official voting date.
We don’t (usually) see what goes on in the secured area where absentee ballot envelopes are counted, checked for signatures, opened, separated and counted again to ensure no ballots were misplaced with both Republican and Democratic workers verifying and signing off on all actions. This finished fairly quickly in Hancock County, but it took much longer in some other areas, and people were quick to assume the worst.
When someone recorded a Georgia election worker discarding an instruction sheet, that video was uploaded to social media with the accusation that the work was discarding a ballot.
A review of the video easily confirmed the paper was not a ballot, but suspicion was already raised, and a lie can travel around the world before the truth puts its pants on.
How do we restore confidence in the voting process when the truth is boring and is seldom known until most people are already convinced of the lie?
And what do we do when our partisan leaders break with the tradition of recognizing the validity of the vote and accepting it?
Mitt Romney didn’t expect to lose, but he conceded when he saw the results.
Hillary Clinton didn’t expect to lose, and she won the popular vote. She conceded.
Donald Trump is the first president to proclaim that he won when the voting results indicated otherwise.
We need a quick and thorough review of our voting process to restore voter confidence. Perhaps we should also give more media attention — as the Daily Reporter recently did — to how ballots are processed. It may even be necessary to conduct a costly recount and review in many places, because the integrity of the voting process is critical to our trust in the government going forward.
A lifelong resident of Hancock County, Linda Dunn is an author and retired Department of Defense employee. Send comments to [email protected].
