LETTER TO THE EDITOR / USE IT, OR LOSE IT

Roger C. Kostmayer

Ask historians or political scientists and they’ll confirm that free, fair and high participation elections are now essential for democracies, and for America. Fact: the US struggles to get 50% of eligible voters to show up for national elections while we should, and could, exceed 80% participation if we made a major bipartisan effort. If this is true, that all public voting should be easy & simple for every eligible voter, then we must do better at every level.

The first step is to accept statistical reality showing that there’s virtually NO voter fraud. Only a tiny fraction of 1/10th of 1% of recent US votes may have involved criminal intent, which exposes partisan claims that “millions” are “changing their cloths” and voting illegally, as unequivocal lies.

There are many obvious best practices that every state should employ, including eliminating all voter suppression attempts & gerrymandering, implementing automatic registration and early voting everywhere, electronic voting, and making election day a national holiday (by using November 11 which is Veteran’s Day). The private sector could be incentivized to help and encourage employees to vote.

Ultimately, each of us is responsible for performing our civic and patriotic duty but, in addition, our leaders must make this broad based bipartisan necessity, a reality.

The danger that failure to exercise our hard won right to vote leads to losing it – is real.

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