The God Of Process Controls American Elections

Across America, perfecting an opaque election process has become more important than the system’s fundamental integrity.

Tadas Klimas | July 19, 2026

The American election system treats the credibility of the result as an irrelevant criterion. This is embedded in the design philosophy that governs how ballots are accepted, verified, counted, and certified. The premise is that the right to vote must be protected above all else (the false god) and that any barrier to participation is profoundly unacceptable.

Noble sounding? In fact, it is not.

The core problem is that the system is biased toward inclusion. It is designed to accept ballots unless there is clear and undeniable evidence that 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 that cannot meet the accuracy requirements of razor-thin margins.

What we have today is the reverse of a confidence-based system.

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

But 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.

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

In this sense, the process becomes a false god: something that must be honored, obeyed,........

© American Thinker