The 2020 presidential election is over. Many believe it was stolen. I agree, though not in the ways many are saying, as I’ve written before.

But it’s over. It’s not going to be reversed, and there are probably very few people who might change their opinion on it, no matter what they hear or what proof they’re offered.

Certainly, we should learn from what happened to ensure it can’t be repeated, but that brings me to the point:

Conservatives should be talking about future election security, not past potential election compromise.

If everyone is interested in fairness and allowing the people to choose their elected representatives, then everyone should be able to get behind election security. And as I’ve written before, the largest enemy facing election integrity is time. The amount of time between voting and vote counting must be minimized as much as possible.

The more time between voting and counting, the more time there is for illegal or fraudulent behavior. When it comes to elections, essentially no one can be trusted because everyone has an opinion and a bias. There’s no changing that.

But we can reduce the ability for anyone to throw votes away, add votes, find votes, harvest votes, or lose votes. We just have to go back to voting in person and same-day voting.

We should not allow early voting. We should not allow mail-in voting (unless absentee voting – specifically, or most importantly, military voting). We should not allow collecting and mail votes for others. We should not allow unsupervised ballot boxes. It should be as it always was.

Turns out, when we first determined our voting procedures, we had it pretty right. Everyone turns up to a pre-determined voting location, they stand in line, they flick the lever, the vote gets recorded, they get counted, and the count gets reported. That remains the best and most secure way to vote.

The objection, of late, has been accessibility. And so, the discussion (or debate) needs to be how to prioritize security over accessibility. In that debate, security should be a clear winner.

If we made it easy for everyone to vote, but no one could trust the vote, that would be catastrophic to our belief in the system. But if we opened the same-day voting precincts to all, and some felt not everyone got to vote, the number would be so inconsequential that at least we could believe in the results.

There’s no requirement to vote, so our elections have always been, “of those who voted, this was the results.” There’s nothing wrong with that. At least we can trust the results. Then it just comes down to how well the marketing performed and how well people were motivated to support a candidate.

The Republican Party should be making a much bigger national deal out of voting security and get large-scale agreement that security is paramount in any election. If you can get a wide majority to agree with that, we can then solve the problem with wide majority agreement.