After Close Elections, Why Isn’t Meticulous Scrutiny Of The Vote Routine?

Daily Caller: I’ve never understood why anyone would urge a candidate to accept the outcome of an election when he or she has good reason to believe it was tainted by fraud. It’s as if there are people who believe that elections are simply a stage show, meant to give people the impression they have a sovereign role in our society, when in fact election results don’t really matter. When there is evidence that jury tampering may have occurred, tainting the outcome of a trial, do we scoff at judges or lawyers who seriously investigate it? Obviously, this would not serve justice. In fact, it would encourage jury tampering.

Americans who really care about the constitutional sovereignty of the people in our Republic should insist on strict regard for the integrity of their votes. So, after a very close election, shouldn’t it be routine to prepare for strict scrutiny of the results? Great care should be taken, for example, to assure that all the evidence needed for an investigation is carefully preserved. People anxious to destroy that evidence should be regarded with suspicion. No power of government should be allowed to order or tolerate its hasty destruction.

Under our republican form of government, the result of an election is, as it were, a message from the sovereign. Someone who purported to read the message, and then quickly tore it up so that others cannot verify their reading of it, should be held in contempt for that act of lése-majesté.

It makes no sense to suggest that this care somehow disrupts the process. It ought to be part of the process, intended to reassure every voter that their vote has not been undermined by fraudulent shenanigans. But, of course, people with the resources and power to rig balloting would likely do everything in their power to discourage an investigation that might reveal their nefarious activities. They want supine acquiescence in the outcome they engineer to become the order of the day.

These are the same sort of people who called for Judge Roy Moore to withdraw from the U.S. Senate race in Alabama before the general election, just because the media contrived to fabricate credibility for largely uncorroborated accusations of criminal misconduct, alleged conduct said to have occurred so long ago that investigating it is rather like investigating an election outcome after the physical ballots have been destroyed.

These people can pretend, if they like, that questioning the outcome of elections somehow undermines their legitimacy. But this pretense involves the fallacy that the legitimacy of the people’s self-government is a matter of insubstantial opinion, however erroneous, rather than reasonably established and fundamental principle. It reflects the elitist faction view that the people’s claim to govern themselves is just an opinionated fiction, resting as it does on the authority of a Creator whose very being they deny, along, of course, with Creation itself.  read more