Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.
That is very different than claiming fraud without evidence.
Let me pick an example that hopefully isn’t controversial. I was in Iowa in 2019. Mayor Pete got on stage and credited Stacey Abrams’ claims that she had won the 2018 georgia gubernatorial election. Those claims were based on isolated incidents of people who say their voter registrations were wrongfully deleted. That kind of story hits people in the gut. But people are really, really bad at evaluating mathematically whether such incidents could have materially changed the outcome in an election that was won by 50,000 votes.
Election security must similarly operate on the gut feeling level. Look at the video of how they do things in Taiwan: taking out each vote and holding it up for everyone to see. Was it in response to evidence of people cheating? It’s to impress upon people the appearance of a system that is transparent and difficult to corrupt. It’s gut feeling weighed against gut feeling. People must be so impressed by the obvious security of the election system that they dismiss the inevitable anomalies as immaterial.
It should not be fully transparent. I should not be able to look up who you voted for. That should be private information.
With that caveat in mind, to my eyes the election system we have is doing exactly what you’re saying it should do.
pclowes starts off the comment you quoted (“Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important”), then rayiner responds with “Faith in elections is a two-way street” and engages with pclowes point by providing a broader perspective. They are not “the exact same sentence”.
Without going too far back, https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/factchecking-clintons-vote...
