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-- Reposted to fix a stupid mistake (said Georgia instead of Arizona in several places. Version with embedded links here: photowordism.home.blog/2025/12/22/ele…).
Election Competency, Not Election Integrity Should Be America’s Focus
That title probably is making a lot of you question: “But isn’t integrity really important?” It is. So, before I explain why I think America has an election competency issue, let me address why that needs to come before election integrity.
The reason is simply this: Americans routinely distrust elections their candidate loses and trust elections their candidate wins. We can see this from “selected not elected” in Florida to “Russia hacked the election” to the mess in 2016/2020. Americans don’t trust the electoral system the moment it is their political ox being Gored.
But, how do you rebuild confidence in a system? Well, you can stamp out fraud and abuse – sure. Do that. You can make it more transparent. That’s always good. But the number one way to restore confidence in a system is for the system to work properly. Once we have a system that Americans believe works, you can then rebuild their faith in the integrity of that system. You’ll never stop conspiracy theorists bringing up secret Diebold algorithms every election cycle if you routinely get stories about things like sticky notes deciding the fate of a race or surprise thumb drives.
And America’s system does not appear to work properly, because things are broken. Let me go to the ur-example for anyone about my age.
Norm Coleman v. Al Franken
This is perhaps the most famous recount after Bush v. Gore. Back in 2008, Minnesota had a really close election. So close, there was a recount that captured the imagination, including creating this neat exercise where you could see examples of ballots that were being contested. When you see these ballots, you may realize that the competency is not just on the side of the people counting the votes.
What stuck in people’s minds though were that what ballots were rejected/accepted did not seem to follow the rules. This seems more like received wisdom, since I recall at the time people claiming the Lizard People vote went to Coleman, but it seems that’s not the case.
But, this recount put America’s inability to follow basic written directions on a crash course with an adversarial no-holds barred, litigious system. And under that system is an extremely political local apparatus that is augmented during a high stress time by motivated volunteers who no one truly believes “just hope everyone has fun” at the polls.
If the hanging chad was the start of the blizzard, Coleman v. Franken was the avalanche towards election incompetency being something Americans just took for granted.
Russian Hacking and Arizona
In 2016 and 2020, mattering who you voted for, you might have heard claims of fraud and rigging, or a win that was too big to rig by 2024. And these are able to stand because even the people who are supposed to be ensuring we have competent elections, just don’t care. You think I’m kidding? Let me present Exhibit A: Stephen Richer of Arizona. He exemplifies what Sir Humphrey might have said in Yes, President, were we parodying America and not Britain: “Almost all government policy is wrong... but frightfully poorly carried out!”
Richer’s argument is that “What some workers forgot to do, however, was sign the receipts and ‘zero reports.’” This, he says, is merely a clerical oversight, and that no consequences should come from this. I’m not a lawyer, but I know enough about any process that if a step exists, it exists for a reason. I think that’s something Chesterton said once—but what Richer would have you believe is that this step is nonsensical bureaucratic inefficiency built into the system that can be ignored.
Richer is arguing that America’s election incompetence is a feature, not a bug. That the state built incompetence into the system. And since there’s just incompetency part and parcel of tabulating votes, when people make mistakes, we should just ignore it like nothing happened because, hey, at the end of the day, what difference does it make anyway?
The problem is, it is not just Richer who thinks that election incompetence is fine and dandy. At least one person claiming to be an election officer on Twitter sees no issue that “it’s too easy something not to get signed even though it’s fine.” Making such a critical error should not be "fine." That's the kind of fine your wife says she's fine after you gifted her a vacuum cleaner.
It isn’t just people slipping up with sticky notes and thumb drives, or battling it out in court over whether someone drawing an X Franken's name and writing: “I want to vote for Norm Coleman” means a vote for Franken or Coleman. It’s that the very people we have running these systems embrace and accept incompetence.
It is baked into the electoral cake, as it were.
Telling Electoral Incompetence From Fraud
Given this, we can’t tell when things like a bunch of ballots ending up in a storm drain if that’s just incompetence or an attempt at fraud. That was a story in California. Here’s a story in Pennsylvania where given it sounds like the mail-in ballots that were tossed were targeted, it’s clearly an integrity issue.
And, Richer would probably say: “Well those people were able to vote later if they learned their vote didn’t count, so no harm, no foul,” or that “some workers forgot not to go dumping ballots in the storm drain.” If you think I’m being uncharitable, it’s because I am. From the outside looking in, an unsigned paper that makes a ballot questionable is just as fishy as someone tossing a ballot in the trash.
Yet, the people who toss ballots in the trash are effectively being covered because America just expects election workers to be incompetents who may not be able to count to 11 without taking off their shoes. As long as the system remains this incompetent, every error is going to be looked at askance because, frankly, it is really fishy. Especially when we look at Arizona, where now the people who questioned the election are somewhat vindicated.
They were right: The process was not followed in at least one way.
The question now is: Was it lack of competence or integrity? We’ll probably never truly know that answer; we just know that Richer doesn’t seem to care that he oversaw some serious incompetence and that there were no real consequences, save for the people who questioned the competence being called conspiracy theorists. Perhaps some of them did have tin foil hats on.
Restoring Competence to Elections
Here though is where I’m at a loss. I’m not a policy wonk. I don’t even play one on TV, and I haven’t earned that particular degree from Twitter University. So, I really don’t know how to fix the problems beyond following the procedures, which Richer and others seem to think are optional.
But, you know a policy I think we should enforce? Consequences. Drastic, serious consequences for failing at competency.
This includes, and it will be unpopular, throwing out ballots that are not properly counted/tracked. Is this disenfranchisement? Yes. Who is at fault? The people who don’t follow the procedures. These people will quickly learn to be competent, or be thrown out as their friends and neighbors wonder why everyone’s votes were thrown out because “Richer said it doesn’t matter if I sign the paper or not.”
You are not going to get more competent people if they get elevated to cult hero status like Richer for failing. You’ll get more incompetent people.
Will this mean that someone might deliberately sabotage the process to change the election? Congratulations: You’re a conspiracy theorist now! That’s what people already think is happening, but they can point to lost thumbdrives materializing from nowhere and the entire bureaucracy shrugging and saying, “Votes appear in the darndest places—” freeze frame, roll credits.
But you know what, if someone who lost a thumbdrive lost their job and got blackballed from all positions of trust in government ever again? Suddenly, being “incompetent” is not practically all upside. It makes explaining a conspiracy so much harder, especially once the naming and shaming starts.
Post Script
So, there we are. My appeal for us to shift the focus from election integrity to election competence. I’m sure people will disagree – but that’s what the internet is for.
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