People want to believe that their voting system is secure. People want to believe that their voting system is free of fraud. People REALLY want to believe that there is enough careful attention to detail paid so that easy to make mistakes do not change the outcome of important elections. Like say, arguably the biggest Mayoral job in the entire country?
Well, in yet another high profile case of, "oops," the New York City Board of Elections has had to admit that someone "made a mistake" by not purging test votes from a system prior to the election being held.
I love the outcome, a pro-cop, tough mayor who will return to Giuliani like policies! Yet it is not about whether or not I like the outcome, it is about whether or not the vote is accurate and correctly tabulated. My desires should not, and do not, interfere with that.
Mayoral Candidate Eric Adams has seen over 100,00 votes disappear from his vote total which has dropped his lead to a mere 16,000 votes (which could potentially be challengeable). As much as I want him to win, I want EVEN MORE for the voting to be right and the counts to be right. So audit, check, double check, triple check, manually recount them, I do not care. Do whatever you have to do, however long it will take, to make ABSOLUTELY certain that it is correct. Not because I want a specific outcome (though I do), but because I want the right outcome, even if the person I want to win loses.
I've stated before in many of my articles that my biggest beef with the American voting system is that it is not secure enough. I do not want a Federal takeover of elections, but if there is one thing that would get me to support a Federal bill, it would be an iron clad lockbox voting system that cannot be hacked or tampered with, and that requires an ID to be scanned before voting. There is NO LENGTH too extreme, and no amount of money too obscene (especially if we are spending billions repairing cities that did not defend themselves from protestors) to ensure that our voting is the singularly most secure voting system in the world.
One person, one vote. Free national voting ID, just prove residency and identity. It is not hard.
Yet it is things like this that continually cause the American public to lose faith in the electoral system of our country. Shall I recount some of the most obvious ones? Florida's "hanging chads," California's "undocumented" voters, Minnesota's BLM poll intimidation, Bernie Sanders being removed from ballots in some states before the primary, Hillary Clinton getting basically free ads from the mainstream media, et al and ect.
This also does not even address the Dominion Voting System issues from the last election or the unbelievably vulnerable mail in voting and ballot harvesting that we had.
People on both sides are losing faith in our electoral process, and you can see it because now the votes are only fair and right if "my guy won." If my guy lost, it is all rigged.
No one could say that if our elections were secure.
The very fact that someone could credibly call an election into question shows that our system has holes in it big enough to drive a truck through, and this "mistake" from New York City only further highlights why we need something that everyone can understand and know that it is what it is.
These continued errors in our voting system only further erode the public's trust and faith in our voting system to the point where events like the January 6th Capitol Riot happen.
When people have no faith in the democratic process of a country, you end up having the very thing that Democracy intends to eliminate; that is, the violent transfer of power.
Can you blame them? Well, no more than you can the "rioters" who burnt down cities and destroyed property throughout the country.
The only way forward is to restore full faith and confidence in our voting system. That is why things like this are so damaging.
We need a better solution, and it is absolutely ridiculous that partisan politics on both sides are preventing us from having one.
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