Opinion: The Case for Real Election Integrity Before It’s Too Late

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

The second Trump term has completed its first year. One down, three to go.

This time, President Trump knew how to fill his cabinet. He appointed some good ones the first time; he’s appointed all good ones this time.

The President hit the ground running, this time, as the saying goes. Revoking destructive Biden executive orders, firing bad Biden appointees, and putting in administrators and secretaries who would strike destructive regulations from the books. Day One.

The Second Trump Administration spent its first year not only tackling the problems of the Biden years, but attacking many of the systematic problems that go back generations, the festering wounds that date back to the Great Society years, the New Deal years, even the Wilson years, wherever possible.

There’s a lot that’s gone wrong in the past century, and this administration is making a serious effort at fixing as much as they can.

But there’s one problem they still haven’t really begun to fix. Vote Fraud.

And if vote fraud isn’t curtailed significantly, the 2026 elections could go as midyear elections often do, and the Democrats will win back congressional majorities, then win back the White House in 2028, and all will have been for naught.

As long as we are correcting problems with E.O.s, the next Democrat president can reverse President Trump’s corrections just as easily as he reversed Joe Biden’s errant ones.

Most on the Right believe that if elections were honest, the Right would win majorities every time, and the Democratic Party would become a permanent minority party, relegated to the worst of our inner cities, defanged from their ability to destroy the country ever again.

It’s a lovely dream.

But it’s not possible, at least partially because there truly are states where the mental illness of leftism permeates a surprising number of minds, and also because election fraud can never be totally wiped out.

Contrary to popular opinion, there are infinite ways to steal elections. The days of corrupt precinct captains copying names off cemetery tombstones and voting those names during lulls at the polling place on election day aren’t over – it still happens – but there are countless other approaches today that leave that old-fashioned method in the dust.

Some areas have touchscreen voting now. Program the screen right, and a touch to the Republican name or picture can generate a vote for his Democrat opponent. If it’s noticed, it can be blamed on “a computer glitch,” not election fraud.

Some areas haven’t cleaned up their voter rolls for decades. When it’s discovered that a vote was logged as being cast by someone who died ten years ago, it can be blamed on “a clerical error” by a distracted or hurried election worker, during a busy rush on a hectic election day, not election fraud.

Some areas have so many common names because of high ethnic concentration. Juan Gonzales or John Smith, or Michael Yen or Maria Poulos, may show up to vote and be horrified to find that someone already voted under his or her name; the Left can declare that clearly the election worker mistook him or her for that other Juan Gonzales or John Smith, or the other Michael Yen or Maria Poulos, in that Mexican-dense or WASP-dense or Chinese-dense or Greek-dense neighborhood. There’s really no reason to believe it’s election fraud. No reason at all. These are all such common names…

We live in a nation of some 340 million people. We have tens of millions of illegal aliens here, some counted in that 340 million, some in addition to it. We also have lots of foreigners who are here legally, some with a green card that will eventually lead to citizenship, many on other visas that will never lead to citizenship. And we have millions of people who were legal voters once, but who moved away or died, days or weeks or years ago, but remain on the rolls anyway.

To list all the kinds of election fraud that exist would take volumes. More important for our purposes is just to recognize that there are so many, and to consider how desperately the Democratic Party battles against any attempt to reduce them.

When the GOP calls for a single election day, or an end to mail-in ballots, or a Real ID requirement, to combat election fraud, the Democratic Party fights on the grounds that it’s inconvenient, or racist, or unfair, and some people need weeks to find the time to get around to it, or can’t afford an ID, or are too busy to vote that way.

We don’t know exactly how much fraud there is (though the fact that the Heritage Foundation’s vote fraud database is so full of convictions for vote fraud certainly provides some indication).

There’s no way to tell exactly, though, because the sanctity of the secret ballot makes it impossible to do a perfect voter verification audit to check out every ballot.

The best indicator – of how much fraud there must be – is simply the way that Democrats fight every single effort at reform.

You think the Democrats protect their high tax rates, their taxpayer funding of abortion, their massive government bureaucracy? They have capitulated on these issues more often than they’ve ever capitulated on election reform.

Election reform is the real third rail of politics, and that’s why we simply have to make headway on it – while President Trump is in the White House – now, before it’s too late.

While we have both houses of Congress, for example, we can pass The SAVE Act, mandating the presentation of a real ID proving US citizenship in order to vote. It won’t stop all fraud, but it would make a huge dent in it, making it much harder for many of the vote fraud methods to be utilized.

A Real ID requirement would prevent someone from using someone else’s name to vote, unless the polling place worker was willing to be an accessory to the crime.

A Real ID requirement would prevent non-citizens from voting – both the ones who do so on purpose and the ones who genuinely may not know they aren’t allowed to.

A Real ID requirement, used at the time of requesting an absentee / mail-in ballot, would prevent much of the massive mail-in vote fraud that we have seen in recent years, especially in 2020.

It wouldn’t help with many other forms of vote fraud. But considering the amount of vote fraud we know is occurring, and how much this one simple requirement would deter, it is certainly a dent worth making.

Much of the work needs to be done at the state level. There are states working 24/7 to increase the opportunities for fraud, even as there are other states trying to reduce them. So this terrible problem will never be fully eliminated.

But as so many of our elections are in 50/50 jurisdictions – not just at the federal level but at the state and county level as well – reducing election fraud even just a little will make a difference. One or two percent is often more than enough to see an election tip in favor of the candidate whom the people really intended to win.

And if we want the countless advances of 2025 – and the many great achievements yet to come in 2026 – to have a chance at lasting through 2027 and beyond, we must do everything legally in our power to reduce the fraud that would put the party of destruction back in power before any of these achievements are truly set in cement.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo