Innocence until proven guilty extends to elections

The Spokane County Elections Department has conducted 21 recounts of specific races over the past 20 years, according to the department’s online archives.

To me, that indicates an inclination towards openness and transparency in the electoral process, not just the number of recounts but also the easy availability of the outcomes. Add to this the department’s willingness to allow election observers, and I feel pretty good about trusting the reliability of elections in our region, whatever they may be.

Other voters should too, but sadly, events over the past year have thrown mud on a process that is the foundation of our society. We now live in a world where if you lose an election, you simply claim fraud to explain your loss without providing any evidence to support the accusation, and thereby cast doubts on the validity of the winner’s achievement.

It’s going to take time for most of us to see through this self-serving con job, but in the meantime, doubts about election reliability will continue, and calls for recounts even when no fraud has been found will persist. I bore witness to this last Tuesday night when an individual at a Spokane Valley City Council meeting stated during general comments that since the county still had the ballots and envelopes from the November election, what harm would it do to simply pull them out and recount and reverify them to make sure.

The harm is this approach is an assault on our foundational principle requiring those making accusations of wrongdoing provide evidence to support their claims, rather than requiring those accused prove they did no wrong.

The latter is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes, comrade. It’s not the stuff of democratic justice.

Think about it this way — how would you feel if your neighbor claimed something of theirs was stolen, and suspected you of being the culprit solely because you lived next door. This neighbor then insisted upon entering your house to check to see if you had their property, and when you refused, called police, who showed up and demand entry because “if you didn’t do it, you have nothing to hide, right?”

Some people would fall for this and let them in, but I think many of us would tell them it’s none of their business what’s in our house, and if you want to see, you need to show properly gathered evidence and produce a court-ordered warrant.

Our ballots are just that — OUR BALLOTS. If there are doubts, there are proper procedures to follow to restore validity and uncover errors, even wrongdoing, which past audits and recounts have shown are rare.

This doesn’t mean fraud won’t happen. Elections are after all manmade institutions.

But fraud is rare. Prior to the 2020 election, the conservative Heritage Foundation identified at least 1,290 proven instances of voter fraud nationally going back to 1992, with most not involving mail-in ballots.

In the 2016 and 2018 elections, Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman’s office found 216 cases of potential fraud — about .003% of the 6.5 million votes cast in those two general elections.

That still won’t stop some people from claiming fraud, but these people are generally the ones always complaining about government — unless of course it’s a government populated by people they elected and run the way they like.

Having said all this, I think Spokane County voters should cast their ballots in August’s primary election with reasonable conviction they will all be counted accurately, and that if there is a problem, the mechanisms are in place to fix it.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].