Letter to the editor: President’s attitude toward election is concerning

Posted

I have grave concern regarding the upcoming election. I am constantly hearing our president talk about the election as if he already knows the outcome. If he loses, he will contest the election. He threatens not to have a peaceful transition of power. He does this by denigrating our mail-in ballots. Here in Washington state, we have one of the most successful and easy to use voting processes in America. If you look around the 50 states, you can see most of them are copying our voting system because of COVID-19.

Voter fraud is miniscule in this country. In fact, voter fraud is the tiniest fraction of election problems. The cases of voter fraud (I could easily call this voter mistakes) is 0.0025%, or 372 mistakes out of 14.6 million votes counted. (Washington Post, June 8, 2020). Our election officials and our secretaries of state all over the U.S. are working tirelessly to make sure our elections are free and fair. Yet our president continues to promulgate this negative narrative of voter fraud. He states clearly that vast voter fraud is happening, but this is simply a way to plant the seed of doubt in our election systems. This is untrue. He is telling a lie.

Our concerns should lie with actual election fraud, which is different. When our representatives in government start fiddling with voting districts, election fraud. When they start purging the voter rolls or when they change the location of the ballot box, that is election fraud. Placing armed men at voting stations is election fraud. When big contributors go around the law and donate more money to a candidate than is legally allowed, that is election fraud. When you remove the sorting machines from Post offices around the States, that is election fraud. When you declare the election already won, that is election fraud. Election fraud is being perpetrated right now, right before our eyes.



We will have to strap ourselves in for a bumpy election season. We will have to be smart, attentive, and discerning. We will have to parse the words of our media and our own representatives. Ask yourself, who is it really committing election fraud? And vote!