✪ Commentary: The God Of Process Completely Controls US Elections

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he American election system treats the credibility of the result as an irrelevant criterion. This is embedded in a design philosophy which governs how ballots are accepted, verified, counted and certified. The premise is the right to vote must be protected above all else (the false god) and any barrier to participation in the process itself is profoundly unacceptable. Does that sound noble? In fact, it is not.

The core problem is the entire system is completely biased toward inclusion. It is designed to accept all ballots unless there is clear and undeniable evidence they are invalid.

Signature verification is treated as a loose, forgiving process. Chain of custody is assumed rather than proven. Mail-in ballots are authenticated through low-information signals which cannot meet the accuracy requirements of razor-thin margins.

Instead, what we have today is the reverse of a confidence-based system. In a confidence-based system, the voter can appear in person, present their identification, deposit his ballot directly, and observe the number of ballots reported cannot exceed the number of people who entered the polling place. Chain of custody should be direct and observable. The voter would be part of the system’s credibility rather than merely a spectator to it.

However, in our present-day, inclusion-biased system, credibility is not something the voter can influence. It is not even something the system tries to measure. To the system and its devotees, measuring credibility is anathema to the process itself.

Indeed, our present system has elevated the process into a hidden object of reverence. The rituals of counting, tabulating, and certifying have taken on a symbolic authority which exceed their actual epistemic value. The system demands these rituals be regarded as unquestionable; even though they cannot and do not even try to guarantee that the results are believable.

In this sense, the process becomes a false god: something which must be honored, obeyed, and defended even when its foundations are fragile. No one openly acknowledges the transformation, but it governs how officials speak, how objections are dismissed, and how the public is instructed to accept outcomes without regard to whether the underlying mechanisms can be credibly established.

The system has thereby drifted away from its constitutional purpose, replacing the pursuit of a trustworthy result with the worship of purported procedural completion. This elevation of process over credibility explains why any simple expression of doubt is regarded as heresy.

The system responds not with analysis, but with moral pressure: accusations of undermining democracy, attacking the right to vote, or spreading suspicion. These reactions are not grounded in the facts of election administration; they are grounded in the need to protect the power & authority of the hidden god.

The irony is the modern system demands complete trust in the process even when the results cannot be verified.

This leads to a deeper structural issue: certification has become a ministerial act. The official should exercise judgment, weigh evidence, evaluate credibility, and consider uncertainty, but does not. He simply checks whether the required forms have been submitted, the deadlines have been met, and the totals reported.

In an inclusion-biased system, it cannot be otherwise, because the system is designed to accept ballots even when their credibility cannot be established.

This creates a trap for anyone who wishes to object. The only legally recognized basis to challenge a result is proven fraud. Suspicion, uncertainty, lack of believability, razor-thin margins, structural weaknesses, and mathematical impossibilities are all declared irrelevant. The only legally recognized basis for challenge is proven fraud.

Yet fraud cannot be proven without investigation; and investigation cannot occur without time, and time does not exist before certification or the January 6th deadline.

It is unsettling to consider how invisible this structural bias is. The assumptions are so deeply embedded that almost no one notices them any longer. The reverence for process, the irrelevance of credibility as a criterion, and the treatment of certification as ritual—all have become part of a civic election religion.

To name the idol out loud feels almost transgressive. Yet, once the structure is seen clearly, it becomes impossible to unsee. The system’s weaknesses are not mysterious, nor are they necessarily partisan.

The contradictions are plain. The voter is told his ballot is sacred, but not that the credibility of the result is irrelevant. He is told that certification is final, even when the facts surrounding the election are so irregular as to make the outcome unworthy of belief. He is told that objections must be based on proven fraud, but not that the deadlines make such proof impossible.

Legislatures have the constitutional authority to address this problem, but they rarely exercise it. Under Article II, state legislatures determine the manner of appointing presidential electors. Secretaries of state and election boards exist only because legislatures have delegated those functions. Legislatures are the principals; secretaries are the delegates.

However over time, legislatures have completely abandoned their role. They have ceded operational control to executive-branch officials and now are hesitant to reclaim it. They fear offending the hidden gods.

Legislatures should evaluate the credibility of every election result; because they have a special duty to do so when the margin is extremely close. Such as it was in Georgia in 2020, which was decided by a quarter of one percent. In such cases, they should reclaim their constitutional authority; and if necessary, appoint the state’s electors by their own legislative vote; a step which is historically grounded and constitutionally permissible.

A legislative vote has a perfect chain of custody, eliminates the uncertainties of signature verification, mail handling, and adjudication, and removes the need for investigation under impossible deadlines. This is not a license to override results arbitrarily; it is the proper exercise of legislative responsibility when the ordinary system cannot produce an outcome worthy of belief.

A system in which trustworthiness is an alien concept cannot and should not be trusted.

Contrary to the usual rhetoric, a credibility-based system is no less fair. It is fairer because any voter can meet the requirements that make his vote count: obtain identification, vote in person, and participate in a process whose chain of custody is observable and whose outcome is verifiable.

Nothing in such a system prevents a voter from voting; it simply requires that the vote be cast in a manner that contributes to the credibility of the result.

Voters deserve a system which can produce results worthy of belief; which treat credibility as a central value rather than an afterthought; and which measures fairness by the accuracy of the final tally, not solely by the ease of casting a ballot.

The current system does in anyway not meet those standards. It is structurally incapable of producing results worthy of belief whenever the margin falls inside its own uncertainties. Once that is seen clearly, the path forward is not mysterious.

Restore credibility as the central design criterion of the election process. Return to legislatures the constitutional authority they have neglected and allowed to atrophy. Design a new and reformed process in which the ordinary voter can again contribute to the legitimacy of the outcome rather than remaining a passive subject of an unexamined ritual.

Until those changes are made, the system will continue to demand trust which it has not rightfully earned. ✪