Instead of election day, we now have an “election season”—during which, over a period of months, we flood homes across the country with tens of millions of mail-in ballots, regardless of whether secretaries of state or local registrars have any idea if those ballots are being sent to the correct addresses. This in a country where 11% of residents move every year. We then wait for sophisticated partisan turnout operations funded by activist billionaires and run by ideological statisticians to round up those ballots in entirely selective ways.

This culminates with us all glued to our TVs on a Tuesday evening in November listening to “journalists” who spent the months leading up to the election smothering any accurate information about the state of the country with a pillow, making empty judgments about the health of American democracy based entirely on how much the results will further advance policies that favor a toxic admixture of their own corporate paymasters and woke Montagnards.

In this world, concerns about candidate quality are irrelevant. If we don’t fix this complete capture of election infrastructure, it might be impossible for anyone with a sincere desire to prioritize the interests of voters over the ruling class to win a national election.

[Elections should take place on one day, in person, with paper ballots that use scan technology for quick and accurate tallies. Those systems exist in abundance; Minnesota and Florida use it almost exclusively, among others. If we need to make Election Days national holidays to pull it off, so be it, but the endless expansion of less secure and less supervised voting options and poor policy choices on the timing of counts undermine confidence in elections — and that confidence is vitally needed. We’re squandering it for no real good purpose at all. — Ed]