No matter the level of distraction from business-as-usual politics and the needs of responding to the current coronavirus pandemic, the case for voting for John Karl Fredrich as a write-in candidate in the November 3, 2020, Presidential election remains strong.

The drive for equal rights for women, and civil rights and voting rights for all, is paramount.  Legal elections require hand-marked  paper ballots and the availability of risk-limiting audits; it’s been proven that putting a computer between a voter and their ballot disallows audits as tampering can change outcomes and remove any traces of the mischief. The Electoral College is a specious anachronism that negates one person/one vote and accentuates the inequality between large and small states that is already institutionalized in the Senate. The United States has lost even the pretense that the results of any election are correct because verification is impossible when evidence of changes can be whipped clean without detection. Why this flaw is not corrected is the advantage it gives to political parties and permanent incumbents so the incentives for fixing it are few, and the cynicism it fosters further discourages larger turnout. That is a persistent pattern in our heavily manipulated elections.

For The Ship of State to right itself in the water the President and Congress will need to work together to get control of the budget. If the legislature budgets by continuing resolution rather than line item mark-ups in committees, and the executive seeks to divert and impound appropriations, there is no discipline and the road to financial ruin is well paved. Better to pave actual roads and build schools and housing and bridges by Congress funding public works and human capital resources and direct money from the military to infrastructure and social services, with proven successful programs like Social Security and Medicare and Veterans Affairs as top priorities. Straightening out the national accounts will require new revenues, the elimination of sweetheart deals for the privileged few, and progressive tax policies that reverse the ‘unholy alliance between business and government’ that has plagued our federal system since the first billion-dollar budget of over a century ago.

I also recognize and embrace the partnership that will be needed between Congress and the President for progress in these areas and in order to advance the necessary reset in American foreign policy from Cold War mind-sets and other fearful and counter-productive attitudes bred from recent mistakes. I advocate unilateral, incremental nuclear disarmament and the deployment of forces only where approved by Congress except for immediate and imminent actual national security threats pursuant to the War Powers Act.

Finally, as the Chief Presiding Officer of our country, I pledge while working to accomplish the above-stated goals to push for preserving the maximum amount of our national environmental assets, including National Monuments, Wildlife Refuges, and water and timber resources. National policies must include carbon and nitrogen dioxide management, regulation of harmful chemicals, and intelligent restrictions on addictive drugs. To further our debate on all of these topics I would require that the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Doctrine to facilitate our national discussion on these subjects and others. If we do not do try to do all of this, and Congress does not hold an up or down vote on all of these matters, in what sense can we say that we are represented in Washington, DC?