There are two major bills in Congress now that for some reasons only one party is enthusiastic about.
Both bills are framed as voting rights bills, that somehow, someone,
like the other party, is trying to suppress the voting rights of millions of
other people. But then when you look at
the bills and what they want, I find it hard to think what voting rights are
being suppressed.
The bills, or bill, do address the issue of whether people
who have been incarcerated have a right to vote. The Constitution doesn’t even talk about who
can vote, except for the 26th Amendment that allows people as young
as 18 to vote, but it doesn’t say that every person over 18 has a right to vote
such that the government cannot restrict that.
Then there is the Fifteenth Amendment that suggests that criminals
indeed can be restricted in their ability to vote.
The only rights our Founders spoke of are unalienable rights
given to us by God. And when they
finally decided to enumerate some of these and codify them in the Constitution
as the Bill of Rights, they didn’t think to include a right to vote.
I venture to say that the most important part of the bills
in the minds of the bills’ authors and their supporters is allowing all voters to
vote by mail.
Is voting by mail a right?
Are people being suppressed if they can’t vote by mail?
Why was it not a right for the last 246 years that we have
been a nation?
I submit that fair and free and honest and secure elections are
built on three pillars that can only be ensured with in-person voting, such that
mail-in voting should only be reserved for rare, necessary cases.
1)
When people vote in person,
we know who is voting. When ballots are
mailed in, we don’t know who filled them out.
But wait. It seems that to know
who is voting somehow suppresses the vote.
Apparently there are millions of people in our country, mostly minorities,
who don’t have drivers licenses or other forms of IDs. And thinking that any person who really
wanted to vote could get one in the four years between the Presidential
elections is just expecting too much of people.
2)
When people vote in person,
they vote in private. Nobody else knows
how they voted, and nobody is able to influence that vote. We don’t know the circumstances under which a
mail-in ballot was filled out.
3)
When people vote in person,
each person puts their own ballot into the box, again without anyone else knowing
how they voted, thus ensuring that only ballots whose voter’s identify has been
confirmed and who voted in private are counted.
With mail-in ballots, stacks of
ballots are entered into the machines at one time in full view of the person entering
them. There’s almost nothing to prevent
additional ballots from being added to the stack and counted.
With mail-in voting,
all the safeguards that have been at the foundation of our election system for
246 years are cast aside as unimportant and unessential and burdensome.
I am concerned that by constantly referring to these bills
as voting rights bills, people will too eagerly support them without fully
knowing the extent, the content, and even more importantly the justification of
all the desired changes to current voting practices.
