Good ol’ paper ballots and required official voter identification might be the only way to restore confidence in U.S. elections. Doubt concerning election integrity has spread like a disease from sea to shining sea. The devil thrives on doubt.
Doubt may be why Texas has decided to opt out of the Electronic Registration Information Center. It made the move to leave the voter information exchange organization Thursday, according to CBS News Texas.
The Lone Star State isn’t alone. Eight others previously opted out of ERIC, according to The Associated Press: Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, West Virginia, Missouri, Ohio, Iowa and Virginia.
The departure of Texas leaves 25 states and the District of Columbia as members.
There’s no reason to think it will stop there.
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With more and more states leaving the program, the costs for those that remain will keep going up, Texas secretary of state spokeswoman Alicia Phillips Pierce said, according to the AP.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson said her office would create an interstate voter registration cross-check instead of participating in ERIC, according to the Austin American-Stateman.
I’m not sure that’s going to clear out the fog of doubt hovering over the election process. It’s just another system created by election officials. Therein lies the problem.
ERIC has and continues to be hounded by doubt.
Louisiana opted out of the system last year amid “amid concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports about potential questionable funding sources and that possibly partisan actors may have access to ERIC network data for political purposes, potentially undermining voter confidence,” according to a news release from Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin.
At this point, it doesn’t really matter whether the doubt concerning ERIC is credible. It’s there. When doubt about the integrity of a democratic system reaches critical mass, it can lead to widespread chaos. It’s anybody’s bet what happens next.
Ironically, ERIC was founded in 2012 by seven states, with the help of the Pew Charitable Trust, to clear any doubts hovering over U.S. elections.
“ERIC was created by election officials, for election officials, to ensure accurate and up-to-date voter rolls all across the country,” Daniel Griffith, a senior policy director for Secure Democracy USA, told the Statesman. Secure Democracy USA is a nonpartisan group with the goal of building confidence in U.S. elections.
That’s the problem. More and more people no longer trust election officials who create systems for election officials.
Look what happened in last year’s Arizona election cycle. It was a clown show filled with horrors that didn’t do much to instill confidence in election officials or the election process. The whole world was watching.
Liberal strongholds such as New Mexico have their doubts about ERIC as well. When New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver was approached by Ohio officials to discuss a data-sharing agreement, she declined, according to the AP.
“I am very interested in the longevity of ERIC because [of] the concept of doing state-by-state agreements, [but] it’s just a mess,” Toulouse Oliver said.
So, why all the doubt? Liberals blame it on former President Donald Trump and others who say something was fishy in the 2020 presidential election. Anyone who had a nose could smell it because there was plenty of fishy going on, even if the fish were underwater where they couldn’t be seen.
For example, in the weeks before the election, Twitter censored the New York Post’s reporting from the Hunter Biden laptop about Democrat Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in his son’s questionable business dealings in Ukraine. Now we reportedly have word from an FBI official that the social media platform was told the laptop information was authentic the day it was published.
If that reporting had been allowed to reach more voters, it could have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
But Trump and other “election deniers” — some with viable concerns, others not so much — didn’t create the contagion of doubt. Blame it on the Democrats.
Remember the Russian collusion hoax? It was designed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to instill doubts about the 2016 presidential election. Incapable of bearing the embarrassment of being trounced by an outsider like Trump, the Clinton crew concocted the conspiracy to undermine his presidency.
The scheme, to a large extent, worked. But be careful what you wish for. The doubt unleashed by Democrats was bound to spill over into the 2020 election and beyond. It seems like it’s here to stay.
That’s what radical progressives want. It’s the old divide and conquer, a favored Marxist tactic. Sow hatred among the people, instill doubt and wait for the chaos to ensue. That’s when they come in and impose government order. For Marxists, chaos is the path to power.
There is a way to fight back. It’s tried and tested and could be implemented with relative ease. It’s called common sense.
Though it may be in short supply in Washington and federal and state bureaucracies, common sense is still common enough among regular Joe conservatives and libertarians. I’d wager there’s even a good portion of liberals who still possess common sense but are afraid if they display it they’ll be canceled.
Should states bring back paper ballots?
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No: 0% (0 Votes)
There’s nothing radical about paper ballots and required voter identification. It’s been done before and would be easy enough to do again.
Instead of implementing systems such as ERIC to prevent fraud, give the power back to the people. One citizen, one vote.
This is the common sense the country was built on. It’s common sense that will restore confidence in the election process and pull the country back from the edge of the progressive abyss.
