By Ron Laughery
Major League Baseball rebranded itself as a political lobbying firm last week by giving Coloradans a gift at the expense of Georgians. Instead of playing MLB’s All-Star game in Atlanta – a town that contributed greatly to President Biden’s election and handing full control of the U.S. government to Democrats – MLB’s commissioner moved the show to Colorado. Why? Because we give better election Juju than Georgia.
In principle, I find our windfall rather unsavory. I believe in letting the athletes compete on the field with a minimum of intrusion from the various peanut galleries off the field and high on my list of peanut galleries I want banned from baseball are politicians pushing agendas.
However, in America today, “politics are part of everything” is the new normal. Time for me to evolve.
The problem is that I don’t understand the political crimes that Georgians are said to have committed. Georgia is being flayed for trying to refine an election process that, in a year, went from mostly in-person voting to mail-in ballots. Colorado went through a similar process a decade ago before we adopted universal mail-based balloting in 2013.
If you’ve never been part of the election process in Boulder, you may not fully appreciate the challenges in running a fair election by mail. Dozens of transactions for each of the hundreds of thousands of ballots must happen quickly and in a way that both the winners and losers of the election will accept the results. Without this, democracy fails.
We got a good look at what democracy failing looks like during this year’s election. Of course, most of this was caused by the rush to “touchless” voting caused by COVID. States like New York where voting by mail was a potentially criminal act had to make it easy overnight. Rather than examining success stories like Colorado’s, some states chose to reinvent the wheel absent knowing the value of hubs and spokes.
The result was delayed results and disputable ballots. Thanks to the hard work and integrity of America’s election officials, none more than the Republicans in Georgia who were fending off daily presidential attacks, the results that were finally presented to America were widely accepted.
But, for states that now see the virtue of vote-by-mail, it’s time to clean up the process. That’s what Georgia’s government was doing when they got into trouble.
Voting law is always a balance between access and integrity. In a democracy, we want all voters to have easy access to a ballot that will be counted. Any barrier to accessibility must come with the benefit of helping to ensure that every person who receives a ballot is allowed to vote that ballot freely and privately.
In today’s scorched earth political conversations, we have a tough time talking about balances between competing interests. For example, requiring more effort from a voter to prove they are the voter to whom the ballot was sent will reduce voting fraud but discourage some voters. In Colorado, we rely on matching the signature on the ballot to a “reference” signature the state has on file. Georgians chose to ask people to provide readily available identifying information, like a driver’s license number or social security number. While the extra effort of finding or getting the needed numbers may discourage some voters, it also means election judges won’t have to rely on subjective and unreliable opinions of barely-trained signature verifiers, as they often must in Colorado. The idea has merit.
In a head-to-head comparison between the Colorado and Georgia voting laws, the Denver Post found little aside from the voter ID issue discussed above that was substantially different. In an enlightened world, Colorado and America might learn from Georgia’s experiences.
Instead, leading Democrats declared Georgia’s legislature to be intentionally racist and acting with the explicit goal of suppressing black American voters. President Biden pushed this point so hard he earned 4 Pinocchios from the Washington Post Fact Checker for a whopper of a lie he told while declaring that Jim Crow was alive and well in Georgia.
The NY Times listed 16 Georgia law provisions that they alleged would limit ballot access. Even after assuming the worst possible intentions of Georgia election officials, the Times still struggled to rationally explain why provisions like “the state attorney general will manage an election hotline” would suppress black voters.
No matter. It appears that seeking truth and political balance have, once again, fallen by the wayside in favor of allowing the end to justify the means. And, for that, at Coors Field on July 13th, let’s play ball.
Ron is a lifelong baseball fan and has had season tickets to the Rockies since their first pitch in 1993.
ron@laugherys.com