On Saturday Politico reported on some momentum in a number of states to ban ballot tabulation machines and mandate that every vote be hand-counted, driven of course by Trump fanboys who still believe Dominion and Venezuela cheated their Orange Pharaoh out of a second term. Like every other batshit plan that comes from the MAGAverse, this is an incredibly stupid and short-sighted move that will actually make vote counts less accurate and take longer. It’s yet another example of the self-fulfilling prophecies right wingers bring upon themselves when it comes to “election integrity,” just like in early 2020 when the Senate GOP blocked Dem election security bills only to have their party screaming about the lack of election security nine months later.

People like to use a lot of sports analogies when it comes to politics. “We’re at the one yard line,” “This is going to extra innings,” “We totally dunked on the libs,” so on and so forth, but in reality there’s a huge gap in between, say, a single baseball game and any individual election. There’s no dispute between Philadelphia Phillies fans and Miami Marlins fans over who actually won a Tuesday night regular season game. Sure, there could be a dispute over a call the umpire made in the fifth inning about if the second baseman touched the bag before the runner made it there, but in baseball blown calls are typically a very marginal issue – especially in the age of video review – affecting the outcome of only a tiny percentage of games in Major League Baseball.

There’s no instance of Miami Marlins fans saying no the Marlins actually won that game when the box score and the official league record says the Phillies won it 13 to 3. Everything happened in public view, tens of thousands of individuals, impartial and otherwise watched it happen and duly noted the score. There’s no room to make shit up like that. Sure the Marlins fans could accuse the Phillies of using corked bats, putting vaseline in the pitcher’s glove, stealing signals, injecting steroids into the batters, whatever scams teams and players pull these days, but that’s on the Marlins to prove and MLB to adjudicate afterward. The umpires called what they saw, the scorekeepers logged what the umpires called into the box score. That was it.

That’s not how elections work. Tens of thousands of people did not watch every ballot being cast in every precinct. It’s impossible to know with absolute 100% certainty that an individual candidate received the exact number of votes as reported individual precinct or district, let alone a state. Even those of us who are functioning adults and generally have faith in the integrity of elections can acknowledge that. Instead, we accept that a count is accurate enough, and that any election being challenged on the margins – like low three figures of votes or less – will be adjudicated as needed and subjected to a rigorous double and triple count to ascertain the true winner. That’s what our system of trust in elections is built upon, win or lose.

But what if we could have a box score? What if every registered voter, in every precinct, in every county, in every state was assigned an anonymized national-level ID code they could use to check if their ballot was accepted and their vote was counted toward their preferred candidates – and see every other voter in every other precinct, in every other county, in every other state?

Above is an illustration of what we propose, at a precinct level in the now-infamous Antrim County, Michigan, of what it should have looked like in 2020 to anyone who wanted to see who voted for whom. If the voter with the number CMZ-XZH-BBX claims he didn’t actually vote for Biden-Harris he could have raised a complaint with the local election board and challenge his own ballot. If CMZ-LXL-LMS thinks her mail-in ballot was stolen by someone else then she can do the same. Some asshole Gateway Pundit fan could have downloaded as many CSVs of individual precincts as he wants and slice and dice the data to his overcaffeinated heart’s content.

It shouldn’t take a lot of imagination to think about how voter rolls can be consolidated into a national database and assigned such numbers. The government is inefficient until it isn’t. Tying registrations to number codes to votes and putting it all out in public for consumption would go a long way to rebuilding trust among the merely wary of the integrity of our elections. For those already convinced they’re rigged no matter what it just makes their bullshit stories harder to justify to those who might be convinced otherwise. And if this plan is too vague or unworkable then let’s hear what a better solution is. We need some new ammo against the conspiracy freaks. Just saying “we trust our election results” doesn’t quite have the same firepower it once did.