Thank election workers for absence of allegations of voter fraud

It’s a relief that in the wake of historic voter turnout and the party in power losing in many states, no one appears to be talking about election fraud.

The truth is that America has the best organized and most secure elections in the world. To begin with, that fact grows out of the Constitution, which puts states in charge of elections. It’s awfully hard to “rig” an election when the top administration is divided among 50 states and 11 occupied territories.

Another reason American elections stand out is because of shared standards and practices among election officials nationwide.

Over the years, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a federal agency that advises about elections but doesn’t run them, has developed best practices for running elections.

Those include recommendations to states on what to do in the event of a natural disaster or system failure. The EAC has issued guidelines regarding physical security and storage of ballots, drop boxes and voting machines. There are “voluntary voting system guidelines,” essentially rules for testing and certifying voting machines before they are used to tabulate any ballots.

Utah’s election safeguards

Since the Jan. 6 riots in 2021, Utah, under the direction of Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, has taken election security to a new level.

The Utah Elections Office, which she directs, has handed down detailed procedures to counties on how to open ballots, how to verify each ballot to make sure it was marked by the person who signed it, how to secure ballots as they are moved from one location to another, how to batch them for entry into counting machines, and much more.

The lieutenant governor has set up a college-level election education program. Every county is required to have at least one “certified” election official who has completed the program.

Sanpete County Clerk Linda Christiansen describes the care her office exercises in handling ballots as comparable to balancing money in the bank. As an election approaches, Christiansen and her staff need to have a count of how many ballots the office has received. They need to know where every one of those ballots are in the processing sequence. Ballots not being worked on at any given time must be locked up.

At the end of every day, the count of ballots in various locations within the office must add up to the total received. If they don’t, the staff can’t go home until the numbers “balance.”

The people behind the process

More fundamentally, there is a deeply ingrained culture of integrity among the 30,000 paid and tens of thousands of volunteer election workers around the country.

Lt. Gov. Henderson exhibited that integrity when she refused to turn unredacted voting rolls over to the U.S. Justice Department for possible nefarious use. That despite the threat of a civil lawsuit or even criminal prosecution. The Justice Department did file suit in U.S. District Court for Utah. The Justice Department lost.

As Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania puts it, America is blessed to have thousands of “guardians of democracy” in virtually every town, county and state. With rare exception, these people are committed to making sure every citizen eligible to vote is able to vote—and then counting those votes accurately.

A couple of days ago, MSNBC showed a picture of an election worker in Mississippi, where the counts for the Republican and Democratic contenders for U.S. Senate are extremely close, pushing a locked cart of ballots in the election center in one of the larger counties.

Program host Stephanie Ruhle declared, “There goes a patriot.” We agree. And we thank them all.