Op-Ed: Whatever Happened to In-Person Voting on Election Day?

DELRAY BEACH, FL – Back, where I grew up in New York City, everybody who was registered to vote voted on the first Tuesday in November, except the few who were infirm or who would be out of town, which they then used absentee ballots to vote. On that November day, you went into the voting booth, after being checked out by a voting clerk who checked your signature with the signature on the voting rolls that was on file with your address. You went into the voting booth, closed the curtain, pulled the lever for your candidates and then reopened the curtain and your vote was cast.

No hankey-pankey, with early voting, or voting weeks and months in advance of the November voting day. No “universal mailed-in ballots” were sent to my house, unasked for. And, all votes were tallied and results were known by late in the evening of election day or early the next morning. It didn’t take weeks to know the results, and there were very few claims of illegal votes being cast. Not like today.

So what happened recently, with so many election totals being challenged?  It seems modern technology has screwed up our election system whereby many people now have lost confidence that our elections are not fair and honest.

We have hired outside companies to tally our votes today. Using modern cyber technology which was supposed to hasten getting the results quickly and more accurately, but it seems just the opposite has happened.

It seems one political party, the Democrat Party, has led the desire to change the voting system, and as it has turned out, not for the better, but for the worse. It seems that making it easier to vote weeks or months ahead, they could get more of their voters out to vote. In addition, in many states, the verification of signatures and a photo I.D’s. was missing to make sure that the person who was voting was actually the person registered and eligible to vote. 

Also, the Democrats campaigned to have blank voting ballots mailed out to all addresses, not knowing if the people at those addresses were real voters. It has been alleged that many of those “universal mailed out ballots” were being voted without any authentication or validation as whether they were legitimate or not. So, what has happened, many that came into the tabulation centers, had no verification signatures or lacked a valid postmark. Some states actually let votes that lacked a valid postmark be counted days after the November election date. Those decisions were made illegally, because according to the U.S. Constitution, only state legislatures could make voting rules, changes, and procedures, not state governors or state or local election officials.

This past presidential election has brought all these problems to the forefront, and many have claimed that the winner of the election, by the media, Joe Biden, won because of fraud and voter manipulation, thereby making him an illegitimate president-elect.

It has been charged that the company hired by most states, where charges of fraud have occurred, was a company called Dominion Voting Systems which is a company with dubious credentials, and which was acquired by State Street Capital in 2018, which was founded by former members of the George Soros’ funded Carlyle Group. In fact, the State of Texas refused to use them because they found them to be lacking in reliability. Even some Democrat politicians, Sen. Amy Klobachar and Sen. Elizabeth Warren complained about the reliability of the Dominion Voting Systems in the past.

My solution to this very serious problem of maintaining voting integrity, is to go back to “in-person voting” where picture and signature verification can be ascertained at the time of voting. Also, to make sure that we make in-person voting more accessible, we should make voting available on the weekend and Monday before election day when most people are off from work. And, any voting not done in-person, should have legal methods to verify the signature and postmark of the absentee ballots. Every “legal” vote should be counted.

We can’t have another election like this past election, as most people in both parties think this election was not a fair and honest election. Our vote should be a sacred right and counted as a legitimate vote, not as has been alleged to have happened this time around. Let’s return to in-person elections like in the past before modern technology screws up another election.