Our elections are clearly not secure. By design.

Brian Kennedy of The Claremont Institute has an article up that would have been viewed as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory fairly recently. Something you might find in a fever-swamp internet chat room, not in The Claremont Institute. It's a long article that makes many fascinating points. Please read the whole thing. But I'll share a few highlights:

The United States is made vulnerable by being the only developed country in the world to allow for this wide-spread use of absentee ballots. Every other advanced democracy conducts their elections in person, with identification shown, on paper ballots counted by large groups of people transparently tallying vote totals with the results available the same day of the election. In states around America, Secretaries of State have allowed or been part of the development of elections systems that would appear to be designed to allow for fraud. So whether not an election is stolen, a free and fair election system has been stolen from the American people.

...

No serious person believes the 2020 election was fair. The signature anomaly, the middle of the night pause in counting in the six swing states—where President Trump was in the lead at the start of the pause, only to have the count resume with Joe Biden ahead—is all one needs to know.

The election of 2020 was decided—most likely—by the illegal collection and production of absentee ballots by a variety of front groups whose purpose was to steal the election. It is not possible to demonstrate with absolute certitude this assertion because there was no real investigation of the election and its many anomalies. Historic numbers of absentee ballots were returned, the chain of custody of ballots was either missing or defective, and signature verification was in many states nearly non-existent. Under the letter of the law, many key states were unable to certify their elections legitimately.

Citizen groups that did investigate were treated not only with contempt, but as if their civic actions were criminal in nature. Charges of Trump supporters being election-deniers became the dominant narrative throughout the left-wing media that only four years prior had supported similar claims from Hillary Clinton and her supporters, claims that remain to this day.

One would think that a legitimately elected president would have been eager to demonstrate to the world the legitimacy of America’s political system. This was not the case. Indeed, raising the question of election irregularities was met with lawfare and intimidation. For many Americans this merely reinforced the illegitimacy of the election and therefore the Biden presidency itself.

Sorry for the long quote, but again, it's a long article. Read the whole thing. He also points out that the federal officials who are overseeing our elections are the same ones who decided to raid Mar-a-Lago and are not likely to be impartial. He also notes that foreign actors are likely to show an interest in our election system if it is accessible.

But he concludes by pointing out that unless we return to elections that occur on one day, where people show up to voting places, show ID, vote under the supervision of other people, then still other people count those votes while being openly monitored by still other people, then we have to presume that our elections are not secure.

In fact, using computer software to count mail-in ballots with no oversight is a system that would appear to be designed to allow for election fraud. So why are we doing it?

I can think of only one answer to that question. And I don't like that answer.