What the Founders Knew About Elections That We’ve Forgotten
When America’s Founders designed our system of government, they weren’t starry-eyed optimists. They were realists. They knew people crave power, and they knew corruption is never far away. So they built a system with checks, balances, and transparency to keep elections trustworthy.
Fast-forward 250 years and… well, let’s just say, we’ve strayed a bit. The Founders might look at today’s elections and ask, “Why did you let the fox guard the henhouse?”
1. Elections Belonged Close to the People — Not Outsourced
Article I, Section 4 gives state legislatures control over elections. The point? Keep elections close to the people, where accountability is possible.
Today, though, much of our process is outsourced:
Voting machine companies often send their own employees into counties to run the scanning and tabulating equipment on Election Day. (Because nothing says “local accountability” like letting the vendor count the votes.)
Ballots are printed by third-party vendors, mailed straight to voters, and often don’t even pass back through the county for oversight. At that point, you might as well order your ballot from Amazon Prime and hope it shows up in two days.
The Founders believed in local, transparent control. We’ve handed the steering wheel to private corporations and middlemen.
2. Voter Rolls Should Make Sense — But Ours Don’t
The Founders would be baffled by how messy our voter rolls have become. At Audit The Vote, we’ve dug into Pennsylvania’s rolls and found things that don’t pass the laugh test:
In 2020, over 7,000 voters had their birthdays mysteriously changed. Unless Pennsylvania suddenly got hit with the world’s largest identity crisis, something isn’t right.
When you take concerns like this to the State Department, they point to the counties. Counties, in turn, throw up their hands because they don’t have the tools or oversight power to fix it.
It’s like a bad game of political hot potato — except the “potato” is our entire voter roll.
3. The Founders Expected Guardrails, Not Convenience
James Madison in Federalist No. 51 wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Translation: design your system as if people aren’t angels.
That’s why the Founders relied on hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots. Everyone could see the process. Everyone could verify the outcome. Nobody had to take a corporation’s word for it.
Compare that to today:
Voting machines run on proprietary code no citizen can audit.
Mail-in ballots float around the postal system like lost postcards from vacation.
And officials reassure us it’s all “safe and secure.” (Insert laugh track here.)
The Founders didn’t prioritize convenience. They prioritized trustworthiness.
4. Elections Were Sacred Because They Were Fragile
Thomas Jefferson famously warned: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” The Founders understood that once citizens stop watching closely, liberty slips away.
Yet today, voters are told to sit back, relax, and “trust the process.” But what we’ve learned at Audit The Vote is that when citizens do lean in—asking questions, reviewing data, or watching polls—they often uncover cracks in the system. Transparency isn’t paranoia. It’s patriotism.
The Takeaway (and a Call to Action for Pennsylvanians)
What the Founders knew—and we’ve forgotten—is simple:
Keep elections local, not centralized or outsourced.
Require transparency, not blind trust.
Design for accountability, not convenience.
And here’s the part they would insist on: citizens must step up. That means us.
If you live in Pennsylvania, there’s a concrete way you can secure elections where you live: run for Judge of Elections or Inspector of Elections in your precinct. These are the people who actually oversee what happens on Election Day. If citizens don’t take these roles, someone else will.
👉 Ready to step up? Visit auditthevotepa.com/help-protect-your-precincts-elections and sign up today.
Because the Republic doesn’t defend itself—it takes We the People to do it.
You'll have to run a write in campaign at this point, which means there is no deadline. We have documentation that will help you with the process. I can email it to you. Let me know if that is of interest. Thank you Laura!
When is the deadline to appoint someone for the ballot? The deadline to run has passed. I am in Montgomery County