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Making All Voters’ Rights Secure through Judicial Interposition

Every count of votes that gets included in certified results must meet basic fiduciary standards.

James Anthony
April 19, 2024

Progressive politicians can’t be trusted with election processes.

Our Progressive-led major parties, state legislatures [1], and national legislature aren’t providing election processes that accurately determine which politicians that voters are choosing.

Election processes that are locally fraud-prone have been massively disenfranchising voters, both locally and nationally. Local fraud-prone election processes have decided nationally who has been treated having been elected president, and now what majorities will be treated as having been elected to both houses of congresses.

After bad election processes go down, it clearly will upset stability to have judges step in and arbitrate. But when a system is rotten, upsetting its stability is exactly what’s needed.

The current supreme court justices should interpose themselves [2] just powerfully enough into tomorrow’s election processes by interposing themselves just powerfully enough into today’s rotten election processes [3]. They should opine now, in advance of the next elections, what the minimum standards must be for a pool of votes to be summed into the certifiable results.

Readily-Traceable Votes and Counts

To safeguard our money nowadays, we use photo IDs, cameras, and signatures to establish identities. We create records of transactions, and we keep these records complete and traceable. We use encryption to keep these records confidential from others, and we use passwords to keep each individual’s record open to each individual.

Elections are the ultimate fiduciary transactions. Not just property, not just liberty, but also lives are on the line [4].

Secret ballots matter but, like financial secrecy, can be safeguarded without compromising accuracy. Meanwhile at present the chief attribute that election processes must have, and lack, is accuracy.

Accuracy comes, above all, from creating and maintaining complete, traceable records.

Mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, drop boxes, and avoidable absentee voting are inherently not up to the basic task of creating and maintaining complete, adequately-traceable records. Even a certified letter doesn’t create a chain of custody that robustly identifies each handler and is simple enough to be audited for anomalies successfully in real time.

Traceability must be readily auditable in real time. This requires built-in simplicity and functionality:

  1. Voting must be in person on a single day [5], except by people who are traveling or disabled.
  2. Each voter’s identity must be proven.
    The proof must be unambiguous and documented. Photo IDs, cameras, and photographic records nowadays are ubiquitous and precise. Signature-matching is irremediably imprecise.
  3. Each ballot record must include proof of the voter’s identity.
  4. Each count record must include the complete ballot record of each vote included in the count.

Untainted Pools of Votes

Summing the counts is the key process step. This is the step where the current supreme court must interpose itself by establishing a minimum process standard:

  1. Each certifiable sum of count records must only include count records that are complete.
    Any count record that is incomplete is tainted. If any such count would be included in the certifiable sums, it would taint those sums, tainting the whole result.
  2. Each jurisdiction whose count record is tainted must be excluded from certifiable sums for the balance of that election.
    Even if this jurisdiction reruns its election to produce untainted results within the jurisdiction, such initial tainting must be disincentivized by excluding the jurisdiction’s results from the sums of votes for any offices that include other jurisdictions.

Enforcing these summing rules will resolve in real time the results of any elections that are conducted using fraud-prone processes.

These summing rules will reverse the current incentive to cheat. Currently, cheating results in adding extra votes that the cheaters want. Under these summing rules, cheating will instead result in excluding both the extra votes and the otherwise-legitimate votes that the cheaters want. Getting the incentives right will change everything [6].

The Constitution is all about processes. Supreme court justices are attentive to processes. Constitutionalist justices are determined to not overstep their role of opining on cases. They also have been sensitive to key processes such as keeping people free to worship as they choose and keeping people’s natural rights secure by protecting the right to keep and bear arms.

Opining that tainted pools of votes must be excluded from certified results will be an optimally-modest process standard. It will require the upholding of basic minimum standards of fiduciary responsibility, but it will steer clear of running the systemic risk of nationally prescribing the processes used to uphold these standards, which would make any errors not only systemic but also ubiquitous.

Supreme court opinions are highly visible. As a result, most politicians most of the time decide that their optimal path is to go with the flow of these opinions. This behavior gives these opinions persuasiveness, which enables opinions that are just to bring justice to all persons.

When a supreme court opines strongly in favor of these summing rules, election administrators will need to start enforcing these rules themselves, or else their own actions will disenfranchise all their own voters, who they favor. This supreme court will have cleaned up elections without forever arbitrating elections.

Now is the time for the current supreme court’s constitutionalists to further safeguard our freedoms, by opining what basic fiduciary standards must be upheld to protect all voters’ rights.

References

  1. USA Constitution, art. II, sec. 1, cl. 2.
  2. Anthony, James. “High-Reliability Self-Governance.” rConstitution.us, 23 Sep. 2022, rconstitution.us/high-reliability-self-governance/. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
  3. “Election Integrity Scorecard.” Heritage, www.heritage.org/electionscorecard/index.html. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
  4. Anthony, James. “Holding Unabridged Elections.” rConstitution.us, 13 Nov. 2020, rconstitution.us/holding-unabridged-elections/. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
  5. USA Constitution, art. II, sec. 1, cl. 4.
  6. Anthony, James. “Zero Tolerance for Election-Manner Violations.” rConstitution.us, 11 Dec. 2020, rconstitution.us/zero-tolerance-for-election-manner-violations/. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.

James Anthony is an experienced chemical engineer who applies process design, dynamics, and control to government processes. He is the author of The Constitution Needs a Good Party and rConstitution Papers, the publisher of rConstitution.us, and an author in Western Journal, Daily Caller, The Federalist, American Thinker, Lew Rockwell, American Greatness, Mises Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, and Free the People. For more information, see his about and media pages, fresh takes, and overview.

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