Time to vote!

 It is a mid-term election in the USA. Over here in Sweden it is soon time for elections as well.

Recently we have seen on the news that China seems to have been trying to influence the US elections—which may well be true; who knows?

We also know, from a vast number of articles and news reports, that Trump has pointed out that elections have been stolen.

I’m no expert on American elections, but it seems like the US electoral system needs an update.

I read that in some states, you don’t need to show ID to vote. To me, that sounds incredibly strange—and wrong.

In Sweden, you must be a Swedish citizen to vote in parliamentary elections. However, for local elections, a residence permit is sufficient.

The voting age is 18; personally, I think that age should be raised, but that is just my personal opinion.

When it is time to vote, you will receive a voting card by mail. It shows who you are, where you live, and the district in which you are to vote.

When voting, you must present this card and provide photo identification. The entire process is monitored—naturally not inside the voting booth itself, where you place your ballot in an envelope, but otherwise throughout the entire chain of events.

I’ve heard and read that it’s not like that in the US. In quite a few states, you don’t need to show ID. But then how do they know who is voting? Can you vote even if you aren’t allowed to? Can you vote multiple times? Important questions, right?

This information is what I found:

36 states required voters to present identification to vote at the polls on Election Day. Of those, 24 required photo ID and 12 did not explicitly require photo ID. 

14 states did not generally require voters to present identification to vote at the polls on Election Day.

Some of these states are:  California, New York, Illinois, Oregon, Washington and others. You check in, give your name and address, sign the poll book, and vote. An ID may have been required when you registered the first time under federal law - the Help America Vote Act requires ID when registering for the first time - but not necessarily at the polls. 

WOW!

There is so much information and differences in the voting system .Reading it all makes your head spin. It’s not an easy system to understand—unless you live in the US, that is.

So how about these claims about stolen elections? Over here from the media it seems like it is just Trump who claims that but oh how false that is.

Trump he talked about that in 2016, before and after winning, he said the system was rigged and that millions of illegal votes were cast.

In 2020, after losing to Joe Biden, he said the election was stolen due to widespread fraud and contested the results in court and in Congress. 

This led to the Jan. 6, 2021 protests at the Capitol.

He continued to talk about stolen elections as a major theme in the 2024 campaign.

But you see others have claimed things.

Jimmy Carter after his presidency said he believed the 2016 election had Russian interference that affected the outcome.

Joe Biden as president frequently warned that election denialism and attempts to overturn the 2020 result were an attempt to steal future elections.

Gore won the popular vote, 2020. Bush won the Electoral College by 537 votes in Florida after the Supreme Court stopped the recount. For years after, many Democrats said the 2000 election was stolen. Bush himself never claimed it was stolen, Gore conceded.

If we go back in history, a long way it looks like this:

In 1824,Jackson won the popular vote and the most electoral votes, but not a majority. The election went to the House of Representatives, which elected John Quincy Adams. Jackson and his supporters called it the "Corrupt Bargain" between Adams and Henry Clay, and ran on that claim for 4 years until Jackson won in 1828.

So as Christians, we should not  fuel conspiracy theories—we should do what is right even when no one is watching—but naturally, we must hold people accountable when they do wrong and cheat the system.

We also need to keep in mind:

"Our citizenship is in heaven" - Philippians 3:20
"Seek first the kingdom of God" - Matthew 6:33

We participate in government, but we don't look to a president to save us or to be our identity. That frees us from fear and from idolatry on both sides.

So when you vote, you are asking: Who will best steward that God-given role with justice, competence, wisdom, and restraint?