As an American Citizen that votes in every election I personally feel injured by people that, without solid evidence and logical reasoning, say that there was election fraud in our elections. It actually hurts to hear these kind of statements and claims. Not only do these claims make me angry, they make me question the validity of the election. When they make these claim I become am an injured party to their conspiracy theory. I want to be able to rectify the damage done to me and others by being able to sue anyone that says that an election that I took part in was fraudulent in anyway when they have no actual proof to support their claims. These people should not be able to get away with saying that an election was compromised without having proof before opening their mouths. The First Amendment does not allow hate speech or speech that causes unnecessary panic like yelling bomb in a theater or airport. Likewise saying that an election was corrupted by this or that also causes unnecessary fear and anxiety. If a person truly believes that an election was corrupted and they have actual evidence, that was not fabricated, and has a direct correlation to, and supports their claims, then they should be able to speak up and say so. However, they should also be ready, at the time of their statement, to provide the evidence to support their claims. Consequently, if they do not then they should suffer the consequences of having shouted BOMB in my theater and having caused me to unnecessarily feel fear, anxiety, distrust, confusion, and anger.
When it comes to our elections only factual statements or opinions that are clearly identified as simply an opinion should be allowed to be made publicly. People should not be able to say things like there were problems with voting machines in this district and then say because of that the election was corrupt without evidence to support that conclusion.
For instance, I worked as an election poll officer in CA. We discovered that because we had to clean each touch screen with an alcohol wipe after each use, occasionally the excess alcohol would drip into the touch screen trim where we theorized that the electronics were and would cause the screen to freeze up. This technically counted as a machine malfunction. Did it cause any problems with voting? No, it had no effect on the election. The three or four times it happened we were able to have the person vote on an alternate machine. To fix the problem we only had to reset the screen after the alcohol dried and we learned to “wring-out” the wipes before using them to remove excess alcohol and prevent that from happening again, and it worked.
To say we had problems with the voting machines would be accurate, but to say that those problems affected the election would be inaccurate. But that is what some of these people are doing and it is causing me and many other Americans distress. We should be able to sue these people for having caused us this distress and by being able to do so it might make them think twice before doing it again.
Election integrity is the defining feature of our democracy. Without it we have anarchy. Those that seek to sow distrust in our elections should face the consequences for having done so. So, if people want to say an election was corrupt they better say that it is their opinion and that they have no proof or as they say “put-up-or-shut-up”.
I am thinking that we should create a law like the new type that Texas has made popular wherein members of the public can sue anyone for having violated some law. (Like on the abortion issue.) Face it there are a lot of election deniers, and it would be nice to be able to go after them for cause. We also have a lot of congress men and women that are election deniers too. I wonder how that would change things.