Vote 2020... Or die trying

With less than 80days until the 2020 election, arguably the most autocratic president in American history is setting the stage to contest the election results before the first vote is cast.

One of the key issues is Trump's insistence that mail-in voting is fraught with fraud. However, there is no evidence of wide ranging fraud in any official report or investigation by any state, local or federal authority. No media outlet has uncovered overt fraud on any scale that could affect the outcome of a national election.

A viral pandemic is sweeping the country and America is now the nation with the most cases and highest death toll per capita in the world. And it’s getting worse.

If I were a conspiracy nut, I’d say the President appears to be running the death toll up to keep Americans from voting – and tearing down the USPS to insure there is no recourse.

While I’m fairly sure it is just the President’s ineptitude that has brought us to this point, it is not beyond our ability – as Americans [not Republicans or Democrats or Libertarians or Independents, or Qanon,…) – to right the ship. By allowing early in-person voting in all states, we can counter the autocratic cult led by Trump that threatens to make our 2020 Presidential election look like a third world dumpster fire.

Here are the simple rules:

1. Only Registered voters can participate. Registration must require a valid photo ID and SSN that proves you are an American citizen. [This is already the case in most every state].
2. Polling stations must open at least 10 days, and not more than 30 days before the election. They must provide safe access (masks a Must) to multiple disinfected polling booths or kiosks.
3. There must be at least 10% of the total polling places open that will be open on election day. It is strongly encouraged that states offer polling jobs to those on unemployment due to Covid-19. The cost of this should be the burden of the federal government under provisions of COVID-19 relief.
4. All early voting polling places must be open on at least one weekend Saturday.  Sunday polling is optional by State.

I’m sure we will not get this done. But we should.

There are other benefits to this solution. One of which is the number of polling stations needed on election day could be drastically reduced - based on the number of registered voters that voted early.  Another is that we may know the local outcome of the election in many areas as soon as the polls close on election day. It's not unreasonable that we could find over 50% of the registered voters had cast their ballots prior to election day. 

Mail Voting:

Many states have laws that prevent counting any mail-in votes before election day. That seems to me to be extremely stupid. A few states have ONLY mail-in voting (Hawaii and Oregon come to mind) but they can report results quickly as they do not have election day counting restrictions.

If a qualified bonded vote counter (one or two per county would be all you need in most cases), with the proper technology to support them, could register each mail-in ballot as received to a secure isolated standalone computer server that is NOT connected to any network - fraud or manipulation would be effectively impossible. It's that simple.