Fix the Fraud

The general election is 291 days away, which means that election officials across America have almost 10 full months to prepare for one of the most consequential and potentially controversial elections of our lifetime.

Here are my suggestions on how they can get things right…

1. Limit early voting to two weeks before Election Day, November 5, 2024. We saw what can happen when early voting is extended for more than a month back in 2022, when a significant number of voters had already cast their ballots in the PA senate race between John Fetterman and Dr. Oz… only to watch in horror as Fetterman couldn’t assemble a complete sentence in their lone debate.

2. Require a valid photo ID. Stop the nonsense about this requirement being racist and meant to suppress the black vote. That is an insult to black Americans who are as capable as white Americans of obtaining a photo driver’s license, a photo state ID card, or some other official form of identification.

3. Require signature verification, so that no one can show up at a precinct with someone else’s photo ID and vote fraudulently. You may resemble someone else, but chances are your signatures won’t match. It’s called two-factor authentication.

4. Print ballots in one language: English. Make a sole exception for heavily Hispanic and Latino areas, but that is it. No more printing ballots in dozens of different languages. No other country in the world does that… and we shouldn’t either.

5. Restrict the use of mail-in ballots to invalids, shut-ins, people who know they will be out of town on Election Day, and servicemen and women stationed overseas as well as American citizens living abroad. That’s the way it used to be… and that’s the way it should be again. Following the contested Bush-Gore election in 2000, a special commission was formed to analyze voting procedures and to make recommendations for preventing fraud. The National Commission on Federal Election Reform (NCFER) was chaired by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, and one of its main conclusions was to warn against universal mail-in ballots, citing concerns about how easily they can be fraudulently cast.

6. Insist that mail-in ballots be recorded as they arrive instead of starting the counting process when polls close on Election Day. That’s the way we do it in Florida and – after the “hanging chads” debacle of 2000 – the Sunshine State got its act together and now tabulates millions of votes in real time, often delivering results within one hour of the polls closing.

7. Prevent media outlets from projecting results in one state while polls are still open in another. This was another recommendation of the NCFER, which feared that early results in the Eastern Time Zone would depress voter turnout in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific Time Zones.

8. Declare Election Day a federal holiday so that banks, businesses, and public schools are closed, thereby enabling their employees to vote in person at the polls. This was another NCFER recommendation.

9. Do not allow mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted unless they are from U.S. military serving overseas. No exceptions… period.

10. Require states to tabulate and certify their election results within 24 hours of the polls closing. Again, no exceptions and no excuses. This is the 21st century, not the Dark Ages.

11. Require a paper trail in states where electronic voting booths are used. Like Ronald Reagan said, “Trust but verify.”

12. Eliminate drop-off boxes for mail-in ballots, which promote fraud on steroids.

And finally…

13. Never, under any circumstance, allow internet voting. If Russian bots and fictitious Nigerian princes can hack into our computers, just image the potential carnage and chaos created by internet voting.