April created a form letter you can mail to your representatives to make sure they’re elected in free elections. But will notoriously untrustworthy people follow the rules? And more importantly, is that cool?
“My idea is to enlist the help of those who may be most motivated and best suited to advocate for an accurate count – the candidates themselves.”
Listen to April’s submission featured in Episode 68 of How Cool Is This? and read a transcript of the full episode below:
April: Hi, I'm April Smith and I'm an election security advocate. Election results in the US are largely unverified; the National Election Defense Coalition estimates fewer than a quarter of states manually check ballots to confirm accurate machine counts. Absentee ballots are often excluded from auditing. Many states don't even audit primaries at all.
If you vote by hand marking a paper ballot, your vote is safer than if you vote on touch screen. But your paper ballot is still counted by a scanner programmed with proprietary code that not even election officials can inspect. My idea is to enlist the help of those who may be most motivated and best suited to advocate for an accurate count: the candidates themselves.
So I wrote a letter for people to send to any candidate running in their district. I call it The Candidate Caution Letter. It lists ways to increase the chances of an accurate count. One way is to look out for certain red flags suggesting counting errors. Another is to have campaign volunteers check public documents, such as the poll tapes and digital ballot images generated by voting machines.
So in essence, they can perform their own audit. Anyone can send this letter to any candidate or multiple candidates. Download it at www.tinyurl.com/candidate-caution. Fill in the candidates contact information and send.
Leave us a voicemail @ 848-863-9917
to submit your idea to How Cool Is This?
Nick: Okay, Brian, how cool is The Candidate Caution Letter?
Brian: This is pretty cool. It does a very good job of recognizing incentives and who can bring about this kind of change.
Nick: I do feel like oftentimes, when it comes to election reform, it seems like the people in power are like, ‘Well, we're not going to really do anything until enough tiny people complain about it.’
But going after the politicians here and saying ‘Hey, you know, if you win an election that's contested… nobody's going to respect you for that.’ I think that's smart. It's really cool.
Brian: It's cool that she is making it easy for people to send this message to candidates. If a candidate received a hundred letters that were all the same, I guess they would read it more likely than just once.
Nick: Maybe the overwhelming amount of something clogging your inbox might get someone in power to finally take notice of an issue.
Brian: And if she's already done the thinking and the work, it doesn't make sense for any other voter with the same problem to go through those motions again.
Nick: When you're trying to promote an issue or get something changed, making it as easy as possible for anybody else to get involved is really cool.
Brian: It would be a lot cooler if you could just say, ‘Hey, this is a problem,’ and then your elected official would listen to you.
Nick: But isn't that kind of the antithesis of democracy? If we just listen to one person that has a problem, why is that problem more important than a problem that hundreds or thousands of people have?
Brian: I guess it's not. I just would like to think that if I noticed something was wrong, I could say, ‘Hey, something's wrong.’
Nick: You want a direct line of access to someone in power, so you can feel like you're being heard.
Brian: That's right, and I think everybody probably wants that in some regard.
I worry that there are candidates who would not care [about The Candidate Caution Letter]. It's like you're going to the person who is breaking the rules and saying, “Hey, can you make sure nobody breaks the rules.”
Nick: I guess that's kind of a flaw with the entire system. When we're asking everybody to play by the rules and some people just choose not to and they get rewarded for that, it's hard to incentivize them otherwise.
It seems like, more and more, some of the people that are getting elected to very powerful positions don't think that the rules apply to them. So, no matter how many letters you sent, they probably wouldn't read them.
Brian: So, is there something cooler that could fix the problem?
Nick: I like the idea of the letter because it's easy. Should there be a stronger way to make sure politicians follow the rules? Probably, but if that way starts to involve things like generals and tanks, then that might be a coup.
Brian: Coups are not cool unless the coup is taking over for an authoritarian regime that is hurting its people, in which case it is cool. Coups become retroactively cool, if they're successful.
Nick: Sometimes things that don't seem cool at the moment can become cool later.
Brian: And not because they are cool, but because enough people are saying that it is.
Nick: That's the power of the people, baby. That's democracy.
Brian: I think we should send this letter.
Nick: I think I'm going to fill one out and send it just because it's so easy.
Brian: If you have any ideas just call our phone number. It’s (848) 863-9917.
Nick: Or listen to other people's ideas at howcoolisthis.show?
Brian: Thanks for listening to this one.
Nick: Thanks, bye.
If you want to urge prospective representatives in your district to ensure their community is legitimately represented and not some sham bullshit that history will call wildly uncool, download and fill out April’s Candidate Caution Letter here.
We’re running daily episodes featuring your ideas about voting, democracy, and politics until the US presidential election is decided. To get your idea on the show, leave us a voicemail at (848) 863-9917.
Follow April Smith on Twitter.
Listen to a 5 minute episode of How Cool Is This? on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else you find podcasts.