It’s just a few days until the election and there are already 165 lawsuits filed according to Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Harris campaign has 400 lawyers drafting legal documents to have ready, with 10,000 lawyers in reserve for election day deployment.
We’ve come to that. It seems our litigious society prefers to settle things in the courtroom rather than at the ballot box. The Supreme Court justices better gird their constitutional loins for what is no doubt headed their way.
Perhaps people are starting to believe the frequently tossed charge that [insert your most disliked politician’s name here] is a threat to democracy should that candidate win a democratic election.
Therein lies the root of the problem.
Our republic is founded on democratic principles which are assumed to be universally accepted. One of these assumptions is that our fellow citizens are fundamentally honest and, like us, desire a fair electoral outcome. One building block of fairness is an agreement about the rules of the game with an impartial application of these rules.
This assumption no longer holds. The integrity of elections is being challenged by both parties but for different reasons. Is the problem that too many fraudulent ballots are being counted or that too many eligible voters are being prevented from voting?
My monthly Socratic discussion group took on this issue at its October meeting. This is a group of about a dozen thinking people who choose a contemporary issue and distribute in advance a written provocation and a suggested reading list. We are expected to come prepared.
Even though we are all conservatives of one type or another, our use of the Socratic method prevents the discussion from being a simplistic echo chamber of conventional wisdom. Our assertions and assumptions are challenged by our peers in a carefully structured and moderated format.
We found common ground in developing a list of voting practices that encourage illicit ballots. Ballot harvesting topped the list. Ballots are “harvested” when states allow anyone to bring in anybody else’s ballots, frequently in bulk. Twenty states have no restrictions on who can submit a mail-in ballot on behalf of a voter. In these cases it is impossible to verify a valid chain of custody, especially when public drop boxes are used.
Ballot harvesting must be the contemporary incarnation of New York City’s 19th century Tammany Hall or Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s political machine in knowing how to get out the vote, one way or another.
We also discussed the issue of citizenship as a qualification for voting. If one follows the news reports on this, one might conclude it is an open question. No, it isn’t … at least according to the website usa.gov. Citizenship is required for federal, state and most local elections. In Indiana citizenship is self-certified when a prospective voter registers. It isn’t checked for native-born citizens but can be through the immigration service for naturalized citizens.
That may be the law on the books but how do election officials enforce it? If there is a national database of citizens, I am not aware of it. The only time I can recall proving citizenship was when I provided birth certificates for my children so that they could be issued Social Security numbers. There is that trust factor again, trust in the system’s inherent integrity and in the basic honesty of citizens. Clearly, that trust is being challenged if all that lawyer time mentioned above is any indication.
Most of our time was spent debating a proposal by the Indiana Policy Review Foundation in its “Indiana Mandate: A Return to Founding Principles” to restrict most voting to a single day, albeit with several modifications. The day would be extended to 9 p.m. and Indiana’s current absentee ballot procedure would be maintained for those who are unable to come to the polls on election day.
We did not reach consensus on this although most were in favor of single day voting with the accommodations mentioned above. I was one of the few dissenters, convinced that a limited early voting option is a realistic accommodation to the way we live our lives in the 21st century. To my way of thinking, early voting is simply a technologically advanced method of absentee voting without requiring a mail-in paper ballot for those who are capable of traveling to the polling place but not on election day proper.
The cynic in me suggests that early voting’s popularity is a reaction to the weariness we all feel as campaigns inundate our mailboxes and television sets with offensive advertising in those last weeks.
But come Nov. 5, you will find me standing outside the local Baptist church at 6 a.m. waiting to vote. There is much to be valued in that ritual.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Send comments to [email protected]
