Here’s an idea: If you believe our elections are rigged — and that we should do something extreme and inane such as abolish mail-in ballots and voting machines — step over to your local county election office and sign up to work. See for yourself. Put some experience where that conspiratorial narrative is.

You’ll learn plenty about our election process, not the least of which is that rigging, perverting or stealing a single vote requires an inordinate amount of planning, subterfuge and sophistication few voters have. The math on such malfeasance — in person or by mail— is undeniable, too.

Voter fraud incidents remain infinitestably small.

You will also discern that rigging, perverting or stealing a general election in the United States via mail-in ballots or voting machines is virtually impossible — even if conspiracists insist mules are involved, foreign countries are feverishly rewriting lines of voting machine code and non-citizens are casting ballots from prison camps in our backyard.

No. If you want to rig, pervert or steal an election, your best bet is drawing nonsensical maps or employing a racial calculus to gerrymander your state into illegible knots, ligatures bent on choking off the way we choose our leaders and essentially conduct our democracy: With the power of the vote. For details see Texas and the ensuing redistricting arms race response in California.

The same thinking has been applied in Nebraska during debates to end our way of determining Electoral College votes, shorthand for eliminating the “blue dot.”

Between gigs as an op-ed writer, I worked at the Hall County Election Office during an election season, not because I doubted the fidelity of our process but rather to be part of a civic duty from the other side.

I stuffed envelopes, keyed in voter data, helped sign up new registrants and, on election night, was part of a well-oiled machine, I sorted, counted, and tallied the results. I worked with the professionals who ran the office and the citizens like me who came aboard in the run up to and on the night of the main event.

Signing up to work elections would also make you part of the solution to a growing problem: The lack of election workers. Nationwide the turnover rate for election workers has hovered around a third since 2020. Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen says the state will need about 9,000 workers to run polling sites and keep county election offices efficient and effective. He told the Nebraska Examiner that he would like to add young people to a workforce often populated by retired people.

Of course, one reason poll workers are leaving and election offices are becoming short staffed started in 2020, when some workers were harassed and threatened by those who chose to believe the election for the White House was stolen. The Justice Department had to create the Election Threats Task Force in 2021 to deal with the boors and bad actors who get their jollies menacing others based on lies.

Conspiracy theory hyperbole aside, as is true with individual votes, the evidence that the country’s elections are free, fair and safe is overwhelming.

Yet, here we are, facing calls to do away with mail-in ballots and join the current gerrymandering mess in Texas in attempts to diminish the power of voting through disenfranchisement or redistricting. The president — without evidence and in direct opposition to the Constitution — is promising to lead a “movement,” using an executive order to rid our remarkably secure and efficient elections of mail-in ballots and voting machines.

Of course, a president has no such authority. The Constitution’s Election Clause gives election responsibility solely to the states and assigns to Congress the duty of federal oversight.

Nevertheless, we are hearing the drumbeat to remove a process that began in earnest during the Civil War when it became known as casting an “absentee ballot.” The idea of giving military men and women the chance to vote while deployed has been a staple of our elections since World War I.

Eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Vermont — have exclusively mail-in voting. In Nebraska, 11 rural counties have all-mail voting, and, on average, voter turnout in those counties increased 16% from 2016 to 2020 when the switch was made. Mail-in ballots also reduce the need for poll workers at voting precincts.

Doing away with mail-in ballots and voting machines solves no problem because none exists. If, however, those changes came to pass, we would have some serious ones on our hands.

This story was published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. Read the original article: https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/08/25/free-fair-and-safe-elections-still-work/

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