Ronald Reagan used to ask: “if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”  But to have self-government, we must depend on many things, foremost among them: Trust. Over the past decade, credibility in major institutions has plummeted.

Given the delays and changing results in the recent California elections, we have another exhibit of the growing distrust in our elections. Alleging fraud in seeing Spencer Pratt sink to third place after the now-second place finisher had previously conceded her loss is said to be paranoid. But here comes the New York Times, with a headline: there is “a lack of evidence of any widespread fraud.”  The word “widespread” carries a lot of water in suggesting at least some fraud, no?

Voting day needs to be voting day, not month. ID must be required; ballot harvesting, stopped; mailed ballots, postmarked.  Nothing could undermine our experiment in self-government more than distrust in the legitimacy of our elections.