Better in their words…

Some say we should calm down about the proposed sweeping changes because academic research shows that electoral tweaks, in the end, don’t confer lasting partisan advantage. This misses a key wrinkle. In a duopoly market, the parties (which are basically marketing organizations) indeed will always tend to gravitate to messages and strategies that divide the electorate down the middle. And big data is apparently making them better at it. The real problem with H.R.1 begins exactly here: Its greater incentive for partisans to allege cheating and refuse to honor outcomes when races are close and even when they aren’t.

Mr. Trump, in his Feb. 28 CPAC speech, presented a vision of voting in which most votes are cast in person on Election Day. Guess what, this served as our least-bad solution for two centuries. In-person voting is good for two things. It makes it possible for independent monitors physically to observe who votes. It makes it possible for them to observe how ballots are handled and stored.

The flaw in mass mail-in voting, which Democrats would make universal, is that nothing is observable except the counting. You can’t see who votes; you can’t see how ballots are collected, transported or stored. Every election in the future, in effect, would be decided by mail-in ballots opaquely delivered to the counting table. Never again might a candidate see a personal upside to conceding that a close defeat was fairly arrived at.

Democrats insist with great simplemindedness that making voting easier is, ipso facto, good. They are partly right: Confidence depends on the vote seeming truly representative. Under any rule tweak, though, research has shown, the nonvoting public and the voting public don’t differ much except in affluence. And no matter how easy we make voting, participation will go down and not up if outcomes are constantly roiled by accusations of cheating.

The problem is intrinsically bound up in a secret ballot. Under any election with a secret ballot, the public can’t really be categorically certain the reported results reflect the votes actually cast. At least when margins of victory and defeat are large, they coincide with incidental indicators such as polling. But we’ve seen what happens when elections are so close that they defeat our ability to define and count “legal” votes with precision, and when it becomes impossible to say this or that rule change didn’t determine the outcome.

Of course, one cannot breathe a syllable of criticism of H.R.1 without being called a racist. There’s a reason con men favor turned-around collars and patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels. Antiracism is the new incontestable virtue that every kind of bad faith and self-interest hides behind. Our founders may have been deists but they had a Calvinist’s low opinion of human nature. In giving us a single Election Day where the ballot is secret and yet cast in public view, they gave us a system that could withstand an unrelenting partisan incentive to discredit inconvenient outcomes.

And don’t tell me about Europe: Multiparty systems that depend on coalitions produce very different incentives for cheating and for lofting allegations of cheating. Their problems are different from ours. Much would become possible, however, if we relaxed ballot secrecy. Suppose a unique numerical receipt were issued to each voter, making it easy to confirm against a published list that his or her vote was credited to the correct candidate. This would go a long way to solving the confidence issue to permit mail or online voting.

But a new risk arises: Anybody who potentially had access to your unique receipt could claim to know how you voted. In our social-media age, with its psychopathic desire to call everybody a racist, with its sick craving to deprive people of their jobs and livelihoods because of their political views, even this small weakening of ballot secrecy might usher in a new moral disaster that undermines faith in our democracy.

By the way, you are asleep if you don’t see the tactical expediency behind H.R.1, from the Marc Elias school at the Democratic National Committee, which gave us the Steele dossier and so many last-minute changes to election rules at the state level in 2020.

It may be a Hail Mary but H.R.1 is the Democrats’ hope that they can upend the filibuster, impose a left-wing agenda that voters never sought, and still somehow minimize the effects of a voter backlash in the midterm congressional elections that are less than 20 months away.

One rock-solid prediction: If H.R.1 fails and Democrats lose Congress, a highly-organized media campaign will insist Republican “voter suppression” was the reason.