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August 17, 2023

If Special Counsel Jack Smith has his way, election integrity as we know it will be a thing of the past, and all election results in the future will be suspect. 

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I’ve got a particular interest in election integrity. As the leader of Tea Party Patriots Action, I’ve spent the better part of the last two and a half years traveling the country, training tens of thousands of citizens for work as election officials and poll workers.

Our work has been necessitated by the doubts raised about election integrity in recent election cycles. Poll after poll demonstrates Americans’ distrust of our elections. Our hope is that we can help reestablish the public confidence in elections necessary for them to function as they must — to allow the electorate to exercise its right to choose our leaders.

Our Founders recognized that the legitimacy of government itself derived “from the consent of the governed,” in Thomas Jefferson’s memorable phrase. Their concept of choosing government leaders by means of elections open to a larger public, so novel at the time, has been embraced worldwide, in name if not in fact. Even dictators seeking to burnish their claims to legitimacy now go through the motions of holding elections. 

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Our Founders, of course, understood something dictators don’t — our Founders understood the importance of free speech and vigorous debate as the means to determine truth, an essential underpinning of the concept of a free election. Jefferson, for instance, wrote that “research and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a free rein to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only…”

“Research and free inquiry” are “the natural enemies of error.” It’s a shame Smith appears to be unfamiliar with Jefferson’s writings on the subject.

Ending the use of free speech and vigorous debate to contest and challenge the results of elections will be the inevitable result of this political persecution of Trump. If Smith is successful, political leaders in the future will be so scared of potential criminal charges being brought against them for exercising their lawful, civil right to challenge election results that they will simply keep their mouths shut and let questionable election results go unchallenged.

You know what kind of governments don’t allow questions to be raised or challenges to be launched against election results? Authoritarian and totalitarian governments, like the governments of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or Kim Jong Un in North Korea — or like the government of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who is reputed to have once said, “There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”

That’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Freedom after speech?

There must be provisions for elections and election results to be challenged. Even if they are never or rarely used, their presence, and the mere possibility that they can be used, if deemed necessary, provides a sense of legitimacy to the elections they safeguard. And without that security, there is a break between the government and the consent of the governed, a chasm so great that it calls into question the very legitimacy of the government itself.