We should overhaul the federal voting process

And make ballot security a higher priority than voter convenience.

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This article is part of an extended series of articles giving policy reform advice to the Trump administration from the Progress-based perspective. If you have not yet done so, I would suggest:

1. First reading Priorities for the second Trump administration to understand the constraints that President Trump must operate within, and

2. Then reading the rest of the series from the “Table of Contents”.

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I believe that it is time for the federal government to overhaul the voting process for federal elections. We need to acknowledge that there is a clear trade-off between:

• Convenience in voting

• Security within the voting process.

For the last 20 years, we have leaned very hard towards making the voting process more convenient for less interested voters. This has largely unintentionally undermined the security of our voting process.

This overhaul of the voting process included the following practices:

• No voter identification requirements

• Expansion in eligibility for absentee ballots

• State government mailing out absentee ballots even when voters do not request them

• Ballot harvesting

• Out-of-precinct drop boxes

• Mail-in ballots

• No required validation of citizenship.

Without realizing it, the United States has rolled back many of the ballot reforms implemented in the late 19th and early 20th Century to counter widespread ballot fraud.

The Democratic party, in particular, has focused on making voting more convenient in the belief that the party will gain additional votes from disenfranchised poor people and racial minorities. Partly because the party believes existing ballot laws are unfair and partly out of self-interest, the Democratic party has pushed hard to make voting more convenient. They have been successful in all Blue states and many Purple states.

Those Purple States play a huge role in determining which party controls the:

• Presidency

• US Senate and to a lesser extent the US House

• (and indirectly) the federal judiciary and Supreme Court.

Implementing changes to the voting process reached its peak in the 2020 election cycle. Just before the 2020 election, state legislatures pushed through a series of changes to the voting process. Many of these policies made sense during a time of Covid lockdowns, but it is important to understand that:

• the Democratic party wanted these reforms long before the Covid epidemic and

• those policies are still largely in place long after the lockdowns ended.

Those who support this trend implicitly make ballot security a lesser value than voter convenience. It has become fashionable to insist that absentee ballots, mail-in ballots, and exterior ballot boxes are just as secure as on-site voting. This is in opposition to the previous bipartisan position outlined by the Jimmy Carter Commission on Federal Election Reform in 2004.

Our electoral process was there for a reason

Supporters of expanding the convenience of voting ignore that our electoral process is there for a reason: lower the levels of ballot fraud. Following the highly contested results of the 1884 Presidential election, virtually all states implemented the so-called Australian ballot to limit opportunities for ballot fraud. The key characteristics of Australian ballots were:

1. identical blank ballots were printed by the local government at public expense,

2. the blank ballots displayed all nominated candidates

3. ballots were distributed only at the polling place

4. voters marked their ballot in secret at the voting precinct.

These reforms were so successful, that we have completely forgotten our own history.

Americans today are quite naive about ballot fraud. The vast majority seem to believe that the act of ballot fraud is somehow unusual or unAmerican. Most Americans seem to think that “It cannot happen here." Not in 21st Century America. Ballot fraud is what happens in other poor or authoritarian countries, but not in the United States.”

The reality is that ballot fraud has been a central component of American democracy for centuries.

America has a long history of ballot fraud

These electoral reforms in the late 19th and early 20th Century were implemented because ballot fraud over the previous century was systemic. From the founding of the Republic until 1884, elections were conducted in a very different manner:

• Ballots were not printed by governments. Instead, partisan newspapers typically printed pre-filled-out ballots. It is not clear to me that voters even had the option of starting with blank ballots.

• Voters cast ballots in full view of local party representatives. Typically, only one party had representatives at the voting precincts: the majority party.

• Ballots were often colored, so it was very easy for local party representatives to see who voted for the opposition party. Because most neighborhoods were tight-knit, it is likely that the voter and the local party representative knew each other and could easily recognize each other.

• Ballots often gave no ability to vote for:

  • third parties,

  • independents

  • minority factions within the party that fail to get the nomination

  • mix-and-match Democratic and Republican candidates.

• Because local party representatives played an important role in which individuals received government services, the economic cost of voting for the opposition might be substantial.

• Voters from minority ethnic, racial, or religious groups were under significant pressure to either not vote or vote for the majority party in the region.

It is not difficult to see how this electoral system was vulnerable to massive fraud. To be fair, it is quite likely that the majority party would have won the vast majority of the elections anyway, but electoral support for opposition candidates would be seriously undermined by fear of reprisal. It would take very widespread popular anger by the majority of voters to overcome the institutional bias in this process.

And even then ballot fraud could still be easily implemented when all ballots are already pre-filled and look exactly the same. A local party official could just drop in an extra thousand ballots when no one was looking, and it was impossible to prove that anything went wrong.

This is exactly why electoral fraud was endemic during this period, and why the Americans saw the need to implement electoral reforms. Electoral laws were written so that people with strong political opinions cannot influence people with less (or no) political opinions while they are actually voting.

Let’s not make the mistake of moving back towards the old, corrupt system.

Should the federal government do this?

As I have stated in previous articles, I strongly support the concept of Federalism. I do so because I believe that the Five Keys to Progress are the necessary preconditions of material progress. More specifically, the Third Key to Progress is relevant to elections:

Decentralized political, economic, religious, and ideological power. It is of particular importance that elites are forced into transparent, non-violent competition that undermines their ability to forcibly extract wealth from the masses. This also allows citizens to freely choose among institutions based on how much they have to offer to each individual and society in general.

The Founding Fathers intuitively understand this concept by embracing Federalism in the US Constitution. They specifically delegate the administration of election laws by the state governments. They did so to avoid a corrupt federal government rigging all elections across the Republic.

Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the US Constitution says:

"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."

In order to comply with this federalist principle, all the below reforms only apply to federal elections. State and local elections will remain the domain of state government. If states want to run a very different election process for state and local elections, then they will have to run two processes in tandem:

• a federal election process

• a separate state/local election process

I believe that ensuring secure federal elections is a key defense against our current slide toward Soft Totalitarianism.

I know some readers will try to turn this into a debate on whether the Democrats “stole” the 2020 election or whether the Republicans “stole” the 2000 or 2004 elections, but that is not the topic of this article. The fundamental problem is that our current election process makes it:

• Far easier for bad actors to “steal” an election

• Almost impossible to prove that fraud occurred immediately after an election takes place and before the results are ratified.

For landslide elections like 2008, this probably does not matter very much, but every other Presidential and Senate election of the 21st Century has been close enough that the bad actors have a strong incentive to “steal” the election even if it is done in a legal way of changing the voting rules before the election. And even in landslide elections, there are always very close down-ballot elections where the candidates are separated by only a few thousand votes.

We need to change federal election laws so Democrats, Republicans, and Independents can have confidence that the results are fair. Otherwise, we risk an arms race where both sides feel justified in cheating because they are confident that the other side is doing it even though there is no proof.

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See my other articles on Electoral Reform:

1. What is the matter with American politics?

2. Ballot fraud is as American as apple pie

3. Ballot security is a serious problem in the USA

4. The Political-Industrial Complex

5. The Primary Problem with American politics

6. How did American politics get so polarized?

7. To reform our policy, we must first reform our electoral system

8. Is reforming American politics possible?

9. more

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The Trump administration should support and Congress should pass legislation to require states to do the following for federal ballots:

Registration

Voter registration is a key step to ensure that voters are who they say they are. Given the number of people who show up at the polls on election day, it is not realistic to expect precinct workers to do so without pre-registration. Once a voter is registered, then it is much easier and quicker for precinct workers to just validate the person standing in front of them is eligible to vote.

1. Require REAL ID-compliant photo identification to be shown in person for voter registration. As of May 7, 2025, US travelers must use REAL ID to board domestic flights. We should expand that requirement to voting in federal elections.

2. The state voter registration file must include the following data for each registered voter:

   1. The scanned image of the REAL ID.

   2. Full name

   3. Residence address

   4. Previous residence address

   5. Precinct they may vote in

   6. Last four digits of the Social Security number

   7. American citizenship status

3. State governments should be required to do the following when they register to vote:

   1. Ask those who attempt to register if they are an American citizen.

   2. Verify using their Social Security card and USCIS SAVE database that the person is an American citizen. If they fail, they may not register to vote.

   3. Purge voters who have moved out of state or died every year before elections.

   4. Contact the state of the previous address so the old registration can be purged from the system. This can easily be done by back-end server queries.

   5. Immediately purge voters who moved within the state so there is only one record of that person.

   6. Annually verify that residence addresses are actual residences (and not businesses, empty lots, graveyards, etc).

Early voting procedures

The only legal alternative to voting in federal elections should be Early voting. Early voting should not be a standard practice.

Early voting should only be for registered voters who have no other realistic option. These include military personnel stationed overseas and those who cannot wait in line at the polling station: the elderly, the very sick, and the seriously disabled. Those people will be able to vote in the preceding week at designated early voting centers.

For virtually all other people, the inconvenience of going to the polling station on election day is tolerable.

1. Early voting must follow the same procedures as election-day voters, except they may vote up to one week earlier.

2. Require that only the following reasons are acceptable for absentee voting.

   1. Military stationed overseas (who will have a separate absentee voting process)

   2. Elderly, very sick, or seriously disabled who are incapable of waiting in line on voting day.

3. Require that voters must request early voting each year.

4. No ballots may be mailed or stored outside designated early voting centers.

5. Require that early voting take place in a secure designated early voting center no more than one week before election day.

6. Early votes must be counted by the end of the day previous to the election.

7. States are encouraged to provide transportation from nursing homes and hospitals to early voting centers.

Voting day procedures

1. Before being given a ballot, an election official must:

   1. Require the potential voter to show their REAL ID-compliant photo identification.

   2. The election official must verify that the physical appearance of the potential voter matches the photo in the record.

   3. Require voters to verbally state the following without prompting by the election monitor:

      1. Full name

      2. Residence address

      3. The last four digits of their Social Security number.

   4. The election official must verify that:

      1. The data stated by the potential voter matches the record.

      2. The person has not yet voted in that election.

      3. The person is in the correct precinct.

      4. The person does not have indelible ink on their right thumb.

2. After the voter deposits their ballot, they have indelible ink placed on their right thumb after voting.

3. Every paper ballot must have a unique scannable code attached to it.

4. Every paper ballot must have a unique ID number so that the ballot can be tracked through the entire voting, transportation, and counting process. Any ballot that does not have a clear chain of custody will be void and not counted. The ID number must have the following metadata stored with it:

   1. Precinct voted at

   2. Time/date stamp of:

      1. receiving ballot

      2. depositing the ballot

      3. every step in the ballot counting, transportation, and storage process.

   3. Candidates voted for each office.

5. Require paper ballots exclusively, though polling stations may use scanners to speed up the initial counting process. If there is a discrepancy between the paper ballot and the electronic record, it is the paper ballot that counts.

6. All precincts are required to hand count all legal ballots by the end of election day at midnight.

7. Electronic vote-counting machines may not be connected to the internet.

8. All electronics used at the polling station must go through a security check one week before the election. Any software that fails must be repaired until it passes the security check.

9. Paper ballots must be stored for at least six months in a secure location.

All of the above is very possible and many of these requirements are already widely-used by US state governments or foreign governments. There is no reason that this process cannot be implemented for all federal elections in the United States. While the process may be somewhat less convenient than the current system, it makes ballots far more secure.

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See my other articles on Electoral Reform:

1. What is the matter with American politics?

2. Ballot fraud is as American as apple pie

3. Ballot security is a serious problem in the USA

4. The Political-Industrial Complex

5. The Primary Problem with American politics

6. How did American politics get so polarized?

7. To reform our policy, we must first reform our electoral system

8. Is reforming American politics possible?

9. more