Fair elections demand a system that ordinary citizens can understand, with safeguards that annoy activists and frustrate bureaucrats. They demand that a voter show identification, vote on a paper ballot, and watch that ballot be counted by citizens monitored by other citizens. For most of American history, paper ballots provided that confidence. Then, election modernizers sold this country a different idea: computers to make elections fast, efficient, and secure.
Americans now vote through an election ecosystem built on machines, scanners, tabulators, centralized databases, and software layers that few officials can explain and fewer citizens can independently audit. This ecosystem relocates fraud into places the public cannot easily see. Our modern electronic election system creates a sprawling supply chain of hardware and software, including components manufactured in Communist China, that puts election integrity far outside the direct control of any voter, precinct worker, or local official.
The 2020 election demonstrated how mail-in voting, with padded voter rolls, weak chain-of-custody, and weak signature verification can be exploited. Election Day has become election season. Foreign-sourced, computer-based, internet-connected voting systems have become standard. Batches of “mail-in ballots” arrive days or weeks after “Election Day”, unfolded, or copied on unofficial paper, and scanned multiple times. Election officials have repeatedly lowered signature verification settings until any signature could pass. In some states, requiring voter I.D. is actually illegal. Taken together, these issues and more required a nationwide propaganda effort to persuade Americans that 2020 was conducted fairly.
Our Constitution assumes a union of basically moral, law-abiding people. That assumption is now strained. Elected officials in California, Illinois, New York, Oregon, Minnesota and other states are openly hostile toward the Trump government and refuse to enforce election laws. Progressive states increasingly treat federal authority as illegitimate, and election administration has become a battlefront in political warfare.
Which brings us to the recent California “elections” for governor and Los Angeles mayor. Anyone watching could easily see the manipulation and fraud going on in plain sight. California’s Democrat-dominated state government isn’t even trying to hide it anymore. It’s right up in our faces for all to plainly see. Blatant manipulation of the political process, obvious vote fraud, with no oversight permitted.
If California is any example, our elections these days are just for show. Did anyone really expect a Republican to win a mayoral race in Democrat-run California? When New York City Democrats elected a Communist mayor, was there ever a real contest? Republican-majority states are no better. Legislation to combat voter fraud, called the “SAVE Act”, has been deliberately stalled in Congress, clearly demonstrating that politicians from both parties like things the way they are.
Communist dictator Josef Stalin once observed that “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” He didn’t mention that it’s the insiders of the majority political party, the ones who really decide who the candidates will be, who dictate the results in advance. The actual voting is just a ruse to convince the rest of us that we actually have a choice.
So how about if we stop pretending, shut down the expensive “boards of election” in every city and county across the country, and skip the televised theatrics? It’s a sinful waste of the taxpayer’s money. Let the party bosses select our “leaders” and “representatives” (as they’re already doing), announce their choices to us, install their hand-picked stooges, and just be done with it.
An Adams County resident since 1997, Steve Boehme is a local Adams County businessman and political commentator, who published the Adams County CROSSROADS magazine from 2005 until 2019.