Will Election Audits Become as Accepted as Voter ID?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns fair and secure elections, an essential ingredient to maintaining a free nation. Third World countries have rigged elections to maintain control for tyrants. There have been questions about the presidential elections for more than twenty years. There have been problems with other elections, but the first big problem was when Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The U.S. Supreme Court made the final decision after numerous battles over hanging chads in Florida.

After the problems with the 2020 presidential election, millions of Americans are insisting that something be done to secure the elections. According to Fred Lucas, a Texas state senator anticipates that election audits will become common and be accepted just as voter ID is accepted today. Texas State Sen. Paul Bettencourt traveled to Washington in 2006 to testify in support of voter ID at a House Administration Committee hearing. He said that the hearing room filled up “because it was a flashpoint.” 

 

“Now, everybody knows that photo ID does not stop turnout. In fact, there is no case in the United States that I know of where a state that has adopted it has had a problem with turnout,” Bettencourt, a Republican, said Thursday during a panel discussion at The Heritage Foundation….

“This [election] audit situation is the same thing,” the Texas lawmaker said. “In the future, it’s going to be commonplace and everybody is going to agree with it, but it’s going to take time to get there.”

 

Texas is leading the charge for election audits. The Texas Legislature passed an election law reform act in 2021 that included the requirement to establish a forensic audit division in the office of the Texas Secretary of State. Since that office oversees elections, it makes sense that the audit division would be a part of it.

People on the left are already claiming that audits will discourage voting and “sabotage” elections. Do financial audits for businesses sabotage their businesses? No. Financial audits simply show where the money came from and where it went. Election audits will show who voted. According to Lucas, panelist at the Heritage event said, “all states should audit voter registration, voting, and vote-tabulation processes and systems to ensure public confidence.”

Lucas quoted Charles “Cully” Stimson, deputy director of Heritage’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and moderator of the event, as saying that the financial audits for businesses and election audits are different only because elections are political, and political trust is difficult to build. “I’m sure there are people watching this saying, ‘Oh, this is a Republican state. These are Republicans who are trying to audit and kick Democrats out,’ or ‘People should be allowed to vote,’” Stimson said, adding:

 

Similarly, if there was an audit in Chicago of the votes, some Republicans would say, ‘You can’t trust that because this is the fox guarding the henhouse.’ How do we convince both sides they are wrong and move it to the point where businesspeople just view it s this is part of business and increasing the confidence that the vote was done right?

 

Democrats claim that the 2000 and the 2016 presidential races were stolen, and Republicans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The Democrats and the media made the 2020 election a bigger deal, so more people are aware of the problem than they were in previous years. Maybe the problem was bigger, and maybe it was not. However, more Republicans are calling for election audits.