I have been complaining to my friends, or anyone that would listen, about Trump’s insistence upon “proving” election fraud. However, somewhere in the middle of the night it dawned on me just how important that gift is to us all. We have been having a lot of concerns about election security over the past few elections; what with hanging chads, stories of bags of ballots thrown in rivers, Russian interference and voting machines difficult (or impossible) to audit. That worry resulted in a LOT of changes about how we do elections; then Covid came along which added in a lot of last minute work-arounds involving mail-in ballots, social distancing and all sorts of large and small changes. While these changes were being made, we sort of had to just trust that the election officers were doing the right thing and that it was all working properly. We really needed a big audit of the system, and Trump was kind enough to make that happen – he even let the Republicans pay for it! Amazing. Not only that, but he pressed hard against the judicial system to see if it might not be possible to break it in ways that could result in election fraud through intimidation and court packing (by him of course). This test isn’t finished yet, but it appears that the system is pretty darn secure and upset proof. The counting has been spot on, and almost all of the court challenges were thrown out. The one big test still coming along is whether or not he can get something before the Supreme Court, and if he does whether his hand picked far-right republican choices support him over the words and intent of the constitution.

We really and truly needed this kind of high intensity, dig as deep as you can test and audit. Once this is all finished, and it is firmly established that there was no election fraud by the Democrats, Biden and the Democrats will be in a much stronger position by eliminating concerns of the election not being fair, or tampering with the process like the last time it ended up in the Supreme Court and they decided to choose the winner instead of allowing the counting process to continue to the end. That sort of thing is not good for the incoming President. As an incoming President you want to win the popular vote as well as the electoral votes, want all fears of fraud or corruption put to bed, and want the votes to make the decision, not a hand full of justices to decide for the nation. So this is perfect for the Democrats and for Biden. Some day, a long time from today, we might offer President Trump and hearty “thank you. (Not that you intended to be giving a gift).”

Who knows, perhaps this will result in finally tossing out the archaic and fraught electoral system of voting.