“The question, ‘Who ought to be boss?’ is like asking ‘Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?’ Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.” — Henry Ford

The question, “Who ought to run our elections?” is easily answered, “Whoever can do the best job of making sure that elections are free and fair and accessible to as many eligible voters as possible.”

Those of a certain age will remember when that answer was clearly the federal government or, more exactly, a state-centered system with some heavy federal oversight.

Not anymore.

Nowadays, it is clear that state election officials, particularly Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, are the ones protecting the exercise of democracy.

It is why Henderson is right — and, given the behavior of so many of her fellow Republicans here and nationally, courageous — to tell the feds to buzz off and stop pestering her for state voter rolls that contain personal information for 2.1 million Utah voters.

And why Henderson was especially gutsy in calling out Utah’s U.S. Senator Mike Lee, a fellow Republican and leader of the crusade for the federal SAVE America Act — a flimsily disguised voter repression bill that would throw a huge spanner into the works of Utah’s exemplary and popular vote-by-mail system.

If the bill took effect in time for this year’s elections, as Lee envisions, it would not allow Utah or any other state nearly enough time to comply by November.

Trump’s minions have no valid reason for such a fishing expedition and, given the wreckage done to such things as the Social Security database by Elon Musk’s unvetted hackers, it is reasonable to fear that the information will be mined for any number of punitive or privacy-invading reasons.

Nowadays, decentralizing the process amongst the states is the best way to ensure the proper functioning of democracy and the best way to make it really hard to steal elections, especially presidential elections.

In the 1960s, mostly, it was all about whether state and local officials, mostly in the Jim Crow South, should be allowed to stop Black Americans from voting.

The answer to that was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and subsequent actions by the U.S. Department of Justice to open the ballot box to African Americans. The justification was the requirement in the U.S. Constitution that, “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.”

The entire history of democracy in America is an arc that bends toward more people able to vote. From white landowners to free white males to Black people to women. It works because we need a government that works for us, a government we feel we can more or less trust, and that is more likely to happen as more and more of us have our say.

Sixty years ago, a federal official looking over the shoulders of local election officials was a good thing, because the feds were looking for cases where people who should have been registered to vote weren’t, and set out to do something about it.

Now, a federal official looking over the shoulders of local election officials is a bad thing, because these feds are looking at people who should be registered to vote and trying to kick them off the rolls.

That’s the whole point of the SAVE America Act, to erect barriers to democracy for women, the young and the working class. That is, people who don’t have passports or birth certificates with their married name on it.

This is a lot more than just a requirement to show your state driver’s license or other ID to register or to vote, something that wouldn’t be unreasonable if states were aggressive in making sure everyone had one of those. It’s an effective, and unconstitutional, poll tax and a blatant way for Republicans to shrink the electorate to better fit their ideal.

While we are worrying about election security, it is really way past time to do away with the Electoral College. Under that system, a few voting machines in a few counties in a couple of swing states could change the outcome of the whole election.

With a popular vote system, would-be cheaters would have to manipulate the path of millions of votes, something that would remain all but impossible with 50 decentralized election systems.

Like the one we are so lucky to have in Utah.

George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, has all of his ID documents. But he’s a packrat.

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