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I really like this death penalty proposal even though I would normally be against the death penalty in the US. The main difference, as I see it, is that working an election is an entirely voluntary endeavor, and I like the idea that the oath's people take have some sort of real legal meaning behind them.
Of course, there's lots of problems with the idea. The most obvious I see are that the number of volunteers would plummet and that foreign intellignece services would certainly try to plant evidence of voter fraud (and I'm sure they'd be able to do it very convincingly) and they could use the death penalty as leverage to have agents in the voting system.
Yes, False positives are an issue, but our Justice system is pretty decent at dealing with/avoiding those.
Hence why I'd put the threshold somewhere around 100 votes so we don't catch, say, some grandma who accidentally voted twice or something. High enough that a volunteer is exceptionally unlikely to 'accidentally' breach it.
I strongly suspect that after one (1) person is unambiguously convicted for election fraud and publicly executed (you KNOW that every single network would cover such an event) that EVERYONE would be aware of the consequence and so it'd be much harder to recruit them unknowingly.
And for people who knowingly collaborate with a foreign party to undermine an election... we already treat Treason as a capital offense.
If faith in election integrity is a critical piece of successful Democracy, better treat it with sufficient weight.
Yes, we treat treason as a capital offense and execute people for it. Nevertheless, the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc very explicitly design their procedures so that foreign powers cannot get leverage over people. If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.
For example, I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens. But I also suspect the vast majority of citizens to turn into traitors and sell information about the election to Russia if a Russian agent provides a credible threat of presenting falsified evidence that the honest citizen committed execution-worthy fraud. This is a textbook case of when falsified blackmail is an effective leverage.
Well, there was a whole whole thing about Russia allegedly recruiting Trump with a pee tape or something.
The only thing that makes controlling people involved in elections valuable is the aforementioned trillions of dollars tied up in the outcomes, and of course Diplomatic/military consequences.
All the more reason to take the 'extreme' measures to secure them.
If you'd asked me this 10 years ago I might agree.
Nowadays, I'm not willing to say even a bare majority are.
But I do believe they respond to incentives! Be those incentives from malicious actors, foreign powers, or their own government.
I simply note that a lot of Election Officials don't have strong incentives for good behavior, and its probably insufficient to 'reward' good behavior on their part.
Which leaves...
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