Photo Credit: Dionesio Grava
Presidential polls 2020 will be long remembered as that shining moment when the American voting-age population got stirred enough to disprove notions about their supposed indolence or political apathy. Maybe it has to do with the fact that voting is optional or political alienation or that elections come too frequently (every two years) for some people. Whatever the reason, the U.S. had trailed most developed countries in voter turnout, according to a study. The previous banner year with an uptick of voters was in 2016 when outsider Donald Trump generated great interest in challenging the entrenched Clinton-Obama machine such that nearly 56% of registered voters cast ballots for the presidency. Yet that 2016 turnout was low by international standards garnering just 30th out of 35 mostly highly developed nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation. It is worse in local elections. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin said that in 2001 an average of 26.6 percent of the voting-age population in 144 larger U.S. cities cast ballots. Less than 21 percent did so in 2011. This year’s election was centered again on Trump – in fact, the Biden-Harris team campaigned on mostly empty venues – but even with ballots still being counted, 148 million votes had already been tallied accounting for 62% of the eligible voters in this country.
On the other hand, this extraordinary upsurge of votes could have been the result of the irregular manner this election had been conducted. Long before the November 3 elections, the administration had manifested its great concern about the Democrat Party’s preoccupation with so-called universal mail-in ballots being greatly susceptible to cheating. While absentee voting is a long-accepted practice (a registered voter must apply for one if he can’t cast his ballot in person), the kind of mail-in version objected to was intended to flood the mailboxes with official ballots addressed to all voters whether they wanted it or not or whether they no longer live in the registered addresses or, worst, they’re dead but their names not expunged from the voters’ registry. The latter kind of voting creates problems that push America to “a chaotic, potentially disastrous post-election period, one that will almost certainly feature allegations of voter fraud, a mountain of rejected ballots and serious questions about the fairness of the electoral process,” wrote Justin Haskins in The Hill three weeks before Election Day. Fourteen days after Election Day as this is being written, votes are still being counted – indeed there are uncertainties in the final outcome of the election – and a chaotic post-election period exists with allegations of voter fraud, a mountain of rejected ballots and serious questions about the fairness of the electoral process.
While the Democrats insist that voter fraud is extremely rare in the US, data from the Heritage Foundation indicates that there had been 1,298 proven instances of voter fraud and 1,121 criminal convictions. That database is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list, said the Heritage. However, “it presents a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country… It is intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.” Indeed, it is most important that the election of a public official especially that of the presidency should be honest and transparent.