"Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord." Isaiah 1:18
George Rebane
There’s an ‘open letter to the President’ going around the email circuit beseeching him to invoke the Insurrection Act, activate National Guard and the military to seize ballots and vote computers across the nation, publish all the secret evidence of alleged voting fraud, and essentially proceed toward a redo of the national election under newly prescribed and strict supervision. The letter was written by two lawyers – Stewart Rhodes and Kellye SoRelle.
Regardless of what we think about the legitimacy of the November election, at this stage of the game I don’t think that carrying out the open letter’s prescriptions is a good idea. If tried, it will not occur peacefully, and will most certainly give rise to massive civil disturbances that could lead to a civil war. The problem is that the US has a 250-year history of elections – admittedly some more contended than others – that have in the end been accepted by our citizens with relatively minimal turbulence (e.g. ‘Battle of Athens’). Because of this, our country has not put in place mechanisms to peacefully contend and correct both statewide and national elections.
Now I believe there’s an 80% chance that nationwide incidents of election fraud, ranging from petty to massive, occurred. And I also believe that there’s a 50% chance that such fraud, as supported by presented and rejected evidence, would overturn significant election results (e.g. the presidency) if allowed its day in court and found to be true. But today, we are where we are, and there remain only a few low probability opportunities to change the overwhelmingly accepted election outcomes using in-place processes and procedures. The enduring problem we shoulder going forward is that, given the polls, there is a significant fraction of Americans who no longer have faith in the manner our elections are conducted (I am one of them.) So, what to do?
My recommendation is that we join in a bipartisan effort to put in place a comprehensive and transparent set of processes and procedures under which future national (and perhaps also statewide) elections may be contended and corrected in an orderly and peaceful manner. This would be launched and supervised by a congressional commission with a staffed working group of people with appropriate legal and information systems expertise to devise, develop, and test the resulting federal System for Contending and Correcting Elections (SCCE).
The bipartisan SCCE would prescribe the required legal underpinnings for its field operations, and recommend to Congress any additional supporting legislation needed. Its working group would publish the how/when/who functions that define such things as SCCE election monitoring mechanisms, election scheduling, means of voting, vetting of franchised voters, accepting and processing reported irregularities, ballot chains of custody, isolating voting machines, standards of identifying and adjudicating fraud, procedures for holding re-elections, and so on.
In the latter case when a re-election is warranted, the SCCE's procedures for the uninterrupted continuance of government in the interval would already be laid out, specifying which elected and appointed officials remain with what duties and powers. It is not yet clear whether all this can be accomplished through legislation, or will the Constitution need to be amended to handle such interregnum matters.
In any case, this approach of commissioning a SCCE during the relative political quietude between elections would serve our country much better than today’s calls for tanks in the intersections and attack helicopters flying overhead. And in the worst case, the attempt to launch such an initiative would be very revealing of which organs of the Deep State, which private sector institutions, which corporatists, and which political parties rise to oppose such approaches to restore public confidence in the elections which sustain our democratic republic.
These are my preliminary thoughts on the matter, and I'm sure readers have their own ideas to offer on what, if any, preparations need be made to avoid the now existential travails we continue to suffer from the elections of 2016 and 2020.
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