Thank God for elections!

By Dr. Larry Fedewa

(October 20, 2019) The most important function of government in the United States of America is ultimately the elections at every level of government – federal, state, county, township, and some other public services, such as public school boards and bond issues. Elections are the way we proclaim our collective “consent of the governed”, as required by the Constitution.

It is important to remember this basic fact at this time in view of two factors which will dominate the next election: 1) the serious and almost successful attempt by the bureaucracy to reverse the presidential election of 2016, and the current attempt of the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives to accomplish the same objective through their peculiar activities to impeach the winner of that election; 2) the extraordinary level of disagreement over the state and future of the country which exists on both sides, which has resulted in massive demonstrations by both sides and frequently by violence from the opponents of the current administration.

All of this dissention would be considerably less ominous were we not in the digital age, in which attacks on the integrity (not to say accuracy) of our votes are subject to manipulation by hackers, both foreign and domestic. This vulnerability requires new safeguards against electronic interference, such as, paper back-up of electronic ballots and picture identification of all voters. Under investigation are a great number of these phony ballot schemes. It is imperative that prudent protective measures be in place before the 2020 elections.

Facing the electors is a succession of computer-powered challenges to a reliably honest election day. Most seem to be occurring at the ballot box level when computer-generated sums of the votes in a certain area are transmitted to a central location, e.g. from precincts to county, district or state headquarters. These are essentially communications hacking.

But there have also been cases of tampering with the voting machines themselves. Thus, the support for paper ballots to be used and retained after cumulative tallies have been made and transmitted. One defense against such tampering is the diversification of centers which are counted to determine the final outcomes. An exiting system lends itself particularly well to this type of “natural” defense, namely, the Electoral College. Among other things, the Electoral College introduces at least fifty wholly separate systems of compiling and posting popular vote totals. (The Electoral College and the US Senate both provide a distribution of power to the smaller states, preventing domination by of the states with large populations. In our day, these provisions allow the existence and relative independence of rural and thinly populated areas of the country.)

Another type of challenge has arisen with the discoveries of the Deep State plot to incriminate the actual winner of the 2016 election with the goal of enabling his opponents to impeach and convict him and remove him from office. This is an extremely troubling development. If successful, it would have undermined the validity of every election to follow, allowing the bureaucracy rather than the public to determine who can and who cannot be allowed to be President of our country. That this tiny group of individuals would even have come so close that it took two years and $25 million of investigation to clear the President of wrongdoing is a frightening realization.

That the opposition party has taken up the challenge is a concern of a different sort. It signifies that any party which does not like the duly elected winner of the other party should feel free to initiate a publicly funded attempt to reverse the election by impeaching that winner. Such a permission portends a federal government continuously consumed by a fight for power instead of carrying on the work of the people. In other words, the failure of our system of government, the death of our democracy.

In the end, the election process chartered by the Constitution and maintained and amended over the years is the most prudent indeed the sacred way of preserving our control over our government. Attempts to compromise and overturn our election process by domestic or foreign enemies must be resisted at all costs or our freedom will ultimately be usurped and disappear.