Just to be clear, cheating in elections will always be with us.  There is way too much at stake for the players to avoid breaking the rules when “necessary.”  They need only to say, “The end justifies the means,” and all should be forgiven.  It is, however, incumbent on the rest of us to minimize the influence of cheating on the outcomes.

The most basic form of electoral cheating is deception.  Kamala Harris has to some degree advocated further construction of a border wall — something she would never really do — but it might get her a few votes.  In addition to deceiving by commission, deception by omission is commonly practiced by the corrupt media when they go out of their way to leave out politically harmful details — as in the case of CBS’s recent heavy edit of their interview with Vice President Harris.  It seems that there is little if any way deception can be eliminated from the electoral process — other than by cultivating a stronger sense of skepticism among the electorate — as it would also benefit many other forms of consumer decision-making.

Back in the day, when she was just a local pol, the late, not-so-great Dianne Feinstein proposed a San Francisco ordinance making it a crime to utter an untruth in a political statement.  Beyond that pesky First Amendment, there’s also the problem of how to promptly rule on such utterances with at least a hint of due process.  She was also a pioneer in the encouragement of early absentee voting — so a candidate could have early votes in the bank — just in case they happen to do a DUI or get busted for plagiarism just before Election Day.

After the results of the election of 1960 were posted, my father, a lifelong Democrat, told me that Nixon would have won the presidency had he demanded a recount in Cook County, Illinois.  It seems that, as a youth, my dad “counted” votes in Chicago, where they were instead sorted out and weighed, rather than actually counted.

Standing in the way of sweeping reform for the sake of election integrity is the reality that the United States is a veritable crazy quilt of hundreds of counties, each with its own registrar of voters, plus the fifty sovereign states and their fifty different secretaries of state.  There is, however, a major reform that can drastically make it a lot harder to cheat, and everybody knows about it: requiring voters to provide a picture ID.

Reaching into their moldy old bag of tricks, the Dems keep trying to brand having to prove who you are as a racist requirement.  Give me a break.  I must show my ID just to buy a can of compressed air so I can dislodge the Cheeto crumbs from this keyboard.  Yet the racist dodge is typical of their condescension...and stupidity.  Should the MAGA horde significantly prevail this time around, picture ID might become the norm, and nobody would be inconvenienced as a result.

There are many other ways to cheat.  Developing countermeasures is not often all that easy when being done against a moving target.  Ballot-handling procedures are pretty much subject to local authority, and the Dems know that.  State regulations and various court rulings have some influence, but enforcement of such “rules” is (ahem) inconsistent.  Though not without its critics, Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules showcases this issue.

There is one particularly reliable way to overcome electoral cheating: win by a big enough margin to irrevocably exceed the phony votes for the other side.  Trump failed to get a second term in 2020 even though he outpolled his score for 2016, likely because there was more cheating.  This is also a state-by-state problem.  It was said that at that time, were New York City and metro Los Angeles not included in the count, Trump would have won.  But they were counted.  And now the Dems are on the march to abolish the Electoral College, which is fortunately a major long shot.  Were they to succeed, a handful of deep blue major metro areas would run the entire country.

Early understanding of this possibility was instrumental in the founders making each state equally represented in the Senate, with subsequent effects on the Electoral College.  And just to cast in stone this protection of the more rural parts of the federation, Article V states unequivocally, “No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate” — meaning that, instead of three quarters of the states being needed to amend the representation of the senate, all states must ratify such an amendment.

Image: cagdesign via Pixabay, Pixabay License.