A Citizen’s Comment on Elections
Imagine if you hired some people to do maintenance on your house, and they conducted the work for many years according to high standards and principles set up by intelligent, experienced people. At some point, however, the maintenance crew either willfully or ignorantly starts doing shoddy and inefficient work. You don’t realize this because you have delegated the upkeep of your home and assume it will go well. When the house starts to fall apart, you know you should have made oversight of the maintenance work one of your duties.
Incompetent or Corrupt?
Similarly, our elections have fallen prey to incompetent or corrupt people.
Electoral election operations have included fraud, and they have become increasingly less transparent. The Constitution is the standard that makes all government operations transparent to the people. The Georgia Sunshine laws spell out the transparency of government functions, so they are Constitutional.
Citizen Oversight of Elections
To bring our elections back to full transparency, I submitted 3 rules to the State Election Board that all counties should be doing per the Constitution and the Sunshine laws. For citizens to have oversight of our elections and have the ability to perform a proper audit, we must have
- Free access to the current voter roll at all times
- The locked certified list of electors before each election, i.e., who can vote
- The list of numbered voters after each election, i.e., who did vote
The counties should post this information for their county, and the Secretary of State should post the compiled data from all counties.
Some transparency remains. Some counties already post the numbered list of voters on their websites.
Citizen Duty in the Election Process
We need to keep the good examples and eliminate unconstitutional processes. We can all make it our duty to oversee the election staff and election processes. Once this data starts getting posted, citizens in each county should compare the lists before and after and tie back the vote totals that the counties post. The data can be sorted to the precinct level, so citizens can just focus on their own precinct. This is a powerful tool for positive change, giving us the ability to ensure the integrity of our elections.
Our government was designed to work with our involvement. Unfortunately, my public education never taught me that, and I just thought that the people in government had integrity and that our Constitution protected us. But it’s actually us who have to defend our Constitution by participation. We, the citizens, are the guardians of our Constitution, and it is our responsibility to ensure its principles are upheld in our elections.
