Let's enter the world of the unhinged for a while and entertain President Donald Trump's assertions that the United States Presidential Election was fraudulent everywhere.
Notwithstanding the fact that elections are a matter for the states to conduct and enforce and therefore the entire Federal Government of the United States has virtually zero standing in any case that might exist relating to elections, part of the very core of the problem lies with the President himself. For the moment I'm going to have to get you to set aside all of the events of the news and all of your political biases because this is a deeply rooted mechanical problem with the way that democracy is done in the United States.
There is a Federal Electoral Commission (FEC) of the United States but they don't actually conduct elections. The FEC is so toothless that it only has 339 employees and a budget of less than $80m; which is probably just enough to pay everyone's salaries, pay the rent, and keep the lights on.
The commission's own website describes its duties as "to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of Presidential elections." This all seems hopelessly inadequate to me, as it contains absolutely no regulatory or enforcement functions and absolutely no ability to ensure the integrity of the elections which it doesn't conduct anyway.
On top of that, it hasn't actually been able to conduct what little functions that are assigned for it to do, for almost the entirety of the Trump Administration.
NPR's Politics Podcast for most of 2017 and the beginning portion of 2018 gave reports on the number of positions that remained unfilled because the Trump Administration had simply never bothered to put forward the names of people to Congress for approval. Apart from judges and justices of courts, the Trump Administration still had about 1700 positions that they never ever bothered to fill; which meant that the authority to conduct the various functions of government was never legally vested in appropriate officers. The FEC remained one of those government agencies which was legally unable to function for almost the entire tenure of Mr Trump's presidency.
For the critical period relating to the 2020 Presidential Election, the FEC was literally unable to function from late August 2019 to December 2020, with an exception for the period of May 2020 to July 2020, due to lack of a quorum. In the absence of a quorum, the commission could not vote on complaints or give guidance through advisory opinions. After July 2020, there were 350 outstanding matters on the agency's enforcement docket and 227 items waiting for action.
We have a President claiming fraud, illegal activity, ballot stuffing and a lack of oversight; which has been consistently defeated in the courts through lack of evidence (63-1 ???), while at the same time he didn't actually provide the FEC with the necessary staff to be able to conduct said oversight.
My natural assumption is that there was always some plan to discredit the election results if they didn't go the way that Mr Trump wanted. I he'd won the election then there would have been absolutely no need to complain about the result. Given that his administration has from Day One shown an amazing amount of ineptitude, it doesn't surprise me that it is also inept at trying to make the case that the election was flawed.
If there had been any serious attempt at electoral reform, then we would have seen national policies and procedures rolled out during 2020. Even now, I don't see any suggestion that there should be changes in the way that elections are conducted. I don't for instance see suggestions that there should be paper only ballots, or an independent and uniform electoral commission to conduct elections, nor have I heard about any plans for how voter ID is supposed to be conducted. It might sound bizarre speaking as an Australian where I have never had to produce any form of identification at an election but I don't find the idea hideously offensive, provided if and only if the obligation to provide Voter ID was placed on the shoulders of the jurisdiction demanding it.
I find it maddening that there were any Senators presenting objections to the election, who argued that the number of votes for President must surely be wrong and fraudulent but that the number of votes cast which gave them their seat in the Senate were pristine and flawless.
The bottom line here is that the United States has been repeated crying out for an independent electoral commission, paper ballots, preferential voting, maybe proportional representation in the House of Representatives, voting on a Saturday, as well as post election scrutineering of votes but it won't get any of these things because it vehemently chooses not to. The people in charge (which includes both entrenched party machines) demonstrably like the system being broken because it means that they get to stay in charge. If democracy suddenly broke out and people actually got to decide their own destiny then things would change.
No comments:
Post a Comment