Election measure in search of problem

President Trump has been very busy questioning the integrity of the election process in our Nation. His primetime remarks July 16 brought more of his falsehoods and unfounded warnings of election tampering by foreign powers and the Deep State. While he asserted that 278,000 noncitizens have registered to vote in our elections, he presented no evidence to support the claim. He expressed with great alarm that Chinese have accessed droves of voter registration lists, but failed to mention that the lists are readily available to all askers and that there was no evidence vote tallies were affected.

His concern goes back to the 2016 presidential election when he won the Electoral College vote but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.87 million votes. He insisted that millions of noncitizens cast votes for his opponent. His concern turned to rage in 2020 when he lost both the Electoral College vote and the popular vote to President Biden and orchestrated an attack on our Capitol on January 6, 2021, to prevent the Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote. He misses few chances to say the Deep State stole the 2020 election, and drastic measures are necessary to ensure free and fair elections now. In Trump’s world, free and fair elections are those that are won by Trump and Republicans.

His call to arms regarding elections include the words, “Without free and fair elections, you do not have a country”. His message to Republican members of Congress in urging approval of the SAVE Act is “you will win the midterms, and you will win every election for a long time.” I agree free and fair elections are an essential element of our modern liberal democracy, but Trump’s motivation for seeking election change is revealed with his partisan words of support for the SAVE Act which would require primary document evidence of US citizenship to register to vote, government issued ID to vote and severe restrictions on absentee voting.

I understand the conflict of values that is central to any nonpartisan debate regarding election laws and processes. Modern liberal democracy requires periodic free and fair elections to hold our elected decision makers accountable to the voters on a regular basis. Free and fair elections, in turn, ought to include political equality where all adult citizens have a right to register to vote, to vote and to have their vote counted, as well as the right to hold office if elected. Free and fair elections also include a need to conduct elections free of intimidation, manipulation and fraud.

The clash occurs when excessive measures are adopted to deter voter fraud and election manipulation resulting in undue barriers to the right of citizens to register to vote and to have their vote counted.

When these barriers are erected in the absence of consequential evidence of voter fraud to provide one party with an advantage over the other, we have departed from any honest debate regarding the best election laws and processes to strengthen our democracy.

The framers of the Constitution placed great faith in state governments to manage elections with the charge in Article I, Section 4,

“The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof, but Congress may at any time by law make or alter such Regulations…” Similar power was assigned to the states in presidential elections as found in Article II, Section 2, “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature may direct a number of electors equal to….” Over time we have amended the Constitution and Congress has passed laws to correct multiple state abuses of their power over elections. At no time has power over election law been assigned to the president by the or law of Congress. Yet, President Trump persists in his effort to mold elections to his liking.

Trump’s crusade to manipulate the outcome of federal elections is best seen as an effort to federalize elections at the expense of state control over elections. He hopes to do this with the SAVE Act and federal compilation of state voter lists to challenge voter registrations by attempting to match registrations with citizenship records using an algorithm which has proven to have a high error rate. In addition, he seeks federal control over validation of voting machines and control over who may submit mailed ballots. The greatest fear of Trump’s desire to federalize elections is he might declare an emergency and employ federal troops or law enforcement officials to seize ballot boxes prior to final tabulation in certain states this fall. Election experts agree elections in the U.S. are extremely difficult to manipulate or to fix the outcome because elections are decentralized at the county and state level.

As many as 10,000 jurisdictions — voting precincts, towns and townships — administer our elections. The potential for election manipulation by domestic wrongdoers and foreign powers increases with increased centralization of control over elections.

We are still celebrating our 250 years of independence as a nation. Those 250 years have been marked by the evolution of a liberal democratic scheme of governance which has included a great expansion of the voting franchise originally limited to white male property owners. The great expansion of the right to vote should be protected and perhaps expanded further rather than discouraged and denied by overzealous measures advanced under the pretense of preventing voter fraud and election manipulation.