Trump should concede — with a caveat

There are four conditions Trump should insist upon

concede
President Donald Trump golfs at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia (Getty)

The networks have made official what seemed to have occurred when Georgia flipped from red to blue: Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. We can spend the next few months analyzing why Donald Trump lost as I started to do on Friday, but fundamentally few of the voting irregularities cited by the Trump campaign appear to be widespread enough to reverse one, let alone several, of the states Trump would need to flip to get to 270 electoral votes. That doesn’t, of course, mean the Democrats in the big cities didn’t engage in shenanigans. It…

The networks have made official what seemed to have occurred when Georgia flipped from red to blue: Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. We can spend the next few months analyzing why Donald Trump lost as I started to do on Friday, but fundamentally few of the voting irregularities cited by the Trump campaign appear to be widespread enough to reverse one, let alone several, of the states Trump would need to flip to get to 270 electoral votes. That doesn’t, of course, mean the Democrats in the big cities didn’t engage in shenanigans. It simply means it will be hard to prove what they did after the fact. Clearly, when Democrat-controlled cities file lawsuits to prevent observers from observing, transparency and trust in our system collapses as reasonable minds ask why they would do such a thing if they weren’t trying to hide something. It’s like the spouse who disables the ‘find my phone’ function that would tell her husband where she is because, well, she is where she shouldn’t be. Cheaters hide their cheating. Non-cheaters don’t.Because of the massive shift to vote-by-mail due to the pandemic and the known voting irregularities, Trump should condition his concession on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President-Elect Joe Biden committing to institute voting reforms for the next election. Specifically, there are four reforms he should demand.First, given voting occurs well before Election Day now anyway, the voting window should become a national standard that is a two-week period of time that runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, including weekends. This period of time gives anyone who wants to vote plenty of time to vote. It should begin the Tuesday two weeks before the first Tuesday in November. No debates should occur after voting begins.Next, every person must vote in person during that time with each state. Mail-in ballots simply lack the accountability needed to ensure people aren’t voting using someone else’s ballot. It also prevents ballot harvesting and other activities that inherently raise suspicions about the outcome. States should provide mobile voting capabilities to those voters who physically can’t vote due to medical conditions so that the voting booth can be brought to the truly physically incapacitated. Then, every voter should have to provide photo identification. We need photo identification to buy alcohol, drive a car, deposit and withdraw funds, and countless other activities. It makes no sense that we don’t require photo identification for our most treasured civic duty. Again, the state should ensure that all eligible voters receive photo identification for those who don’t have a driver’s license. For those who don’t drive or get a state photo identification, simply have them download a photo from a smartphone that then can be used to verify their identification when they vote. I just did this for my daughter taking the SAT; the barrier for everyone to get a photo identification on record simply isn’t that hard.

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Finally, every state must be required to clean up its voter rolls to remove dead people and non-residents. Why a state or politician wouldn’t want to have clean voter rolls should raise alarm bells with voters.The bottom line is that the integrity of our election system has now been questioned by both sides in the last two presidential elections. If we want to restore confidence and trust in our election system and the outcomes it produces, the simple reforms above should be instituted and paid for by federal funds. Nothing the federal government funds outside of our national defense is more important.Thus, Trump should concede the election on the condition of an agreement by those who will be in-charge after Inauguration Day to reform our voting system for the good of the country. Anyone opposed to these reforms would only be opposed because they know the reforms eliminate avenues in which nefarious activities can be performed. By doing this, Trump will be taking the high road and putting Democrats in a box in which they have to defend deficient election practices that they themselves attacked as recently as 2016.

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