Dakota Beacon

Shouldn’t we take a slower approach to the kinds of legislation proposed to effect election integrity?  

It is the history of world tragedy that most of the worst policies have come about as a “correction” - a means of fixing something that truly does need fixing, but with terrible outcomes not anticipated by the ordinary citizens who have supported it.  We have lots of examples.  Some are, of course, more terrible than others.

Here is an instance:  people believed that it was desirable to lower carbon emissions - especially those coming from automobiles.  So the simple-minded solution was to impose serious restrictions on automobiles.  Trucks were exempt for practical reasons, but cars?  They had to comply with very restrictive design changes to control the emissions.  (We don’t even need to go into the idiocy of limiting carbon dioxide here.)  Have you ever wondered why the extremely attractive and useful station wagon has disappeared?  It is because a station wagon is basically a “car”, not a “truck”.  The car manufacturers are not totally stupid.  They saw this as an opportunity to focus on making trucks, not cars.  So station wagons went away and minivans appeared on our streets.  Minivans are “trucks”, not cars.  Just “mini” trucks.  Minivans eventually gave way to the more limber SUVs which we see today.  And cars became smaller.  Today Ford no longer even bothers with cars.  The popular Taurus is no more.  Now Ford makes only trucks.  Their top label is the F-150.  Those of us who would much prefer a station wagon for a number of reasons are just out of luck.  

The earth’s temperature has not decreased one degree since these emissions controls went into effect.  There are a few reasons for this.  While our government was imposing these controls on our cars they were not idle when it came to the manufacturing sector.  And the more such restrictions we have the more incentive we give to manufacturers to either go out of the manufacturing business or move their operations to countries - usually developing countries - which do not care about emissions.  These developing and third- or second-world nations (India, China, Mexico, etc.) don’t care about “climate change”.  What they want is economic change in their favor.  Overall pollution world-wide was obviously not helped by our country’s punctilious enforcement of these emissions controls.  

That is one example of good intentions run amok.  But more seriously for American citizens, is the misguided effort among conservatives and Republicans to look for any port in a storm with regard to restoring “election integrity”.  For most Republicans this involves the use of some kind of massive national data base, like the much hated “Real ID”.  There are reasons we should be very cautious about establishing this.  

We saw in mid-20th Century East Germany how such data was collected on the poor serfs who lived there - scent samples in jars which utilized the police and military tracking dogs to make sure that people were kept in check.  We have an even more horrific example right now in China.  

 We all know about China’s oppressive “social credit score” system and the constant surveillance required for that - China has cameras everywhere.  There is absolutely no privacy there.  That is but one use of this kind of data base in China.  Here’s another:  tissue typing for purposes of involuntary organ donation.  

Although the database itself is not the topic of Jan Jekielek’s presentation here, this punitive and controlling marketing of human organs is one end that this kind of data collection can take us to.  And it’s not a place any of us would want to go.  Their barbaric practice would not even be possible without a data base like this.  True, we aren’t required to provide biological data (yet) but in the name of election integrity we are putting the machinery in place and this should worry us and give us pause.  

Every egregious imposition on our liberty and privacy had its beginning in some kind of excuse for “security”.  Cameras everywhere provide a record of our comings and goings (including our own ring cameras) which help police when a crime is committed, but also tracks our every move.  Our appliances record and transmit our private conversations at home.  People foolish enough to have Siri or Rufus or Alexa or whatever “helper” bot, can expect no privacy.  We have vacuum cleaners that are capable of mapping our floors and furniture.    Once we establish a database for one purpose, however laudable or necessary, we will see this expand rapidly.  

A better way to ensure election integrity would be to use more basic means - 1) paper ballots; 2) hand counting (no machines); 3) one day only for in-person voting; 4) no drop boxes; 5) no ballot harvesting; 6) absentee ballots on only a one-on-one basis, with a careful process of application like we had 30 years ago (request an application form, it is sent out, once received it is filled out, witnessed and notarized, returned, a ballot is sent out and this is filled in and returned).  The process we used to follow provided security and integrity.  And 7) no interruption in the counting process, no matter how long it takes (I’ve done this - it’s a long night but worth it).  These means would be better than some easy “Real ID” fix.  We should stop handing out drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants like Halloween candy and carefully distinguish citizens’ licenses from licenses of those who are legal to drive but not to vote.  That is easy to do.  

Americans have become too inclined to seek the easiest one-move kind of verification but it comes at way too high a cost.