The election of 2020 will be the culmination of 20 years of political chicanery involving the right to vote.

North Dakota and the other 49 have been closing election loopholes that don’t exist to exploit the ballot box for political gain.

The North Dakota Legislature has made voting more complicated to guard the integrity of the ballot and the Republican Party. Democrats could vote every cemetery in North Dakota and still fall short of a majority. So what’s the worry?

We have cast 10,000,000 votes in North Dakota in the last 10 years with nary an illegal ballot reported. Whenever the state’s elections come up, the secretary of state drags out six anemic cases of fraud, most of which are petition violations that have nothing to do with fraudulent voting.

One cynic claims that there is no worry about election fraud because there aren’t any candidates you would want to vote for twice anyway. He was probably an envious somebody from Montana.

Hillary wins popular vote

While elections are matters of state and local jurisdiction, when President Donald discovered that Hillary had 2.8 million votes more than he did the federal government got involved. Everybody knew that Hillary was a crook so she must have stolen them from his total.

The last ballots weren’t even counted when Donald created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to start a nationwide hunt for at least 2.8 million fraudulent votes. He actually wanted them to find three to five million. Five million would have been a free overnight at Mar a Logo.

And just to be sure the job was done right, he assigned Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to head up the Commission. Nothing was happening in Washington or Kansas anyway.

Commission asks for everything

The first thing the Commission needed was all of the voter data in the possession of the states and counties.

It asked states for Social Security numbers, names, party affiliation, felony convictions, birthdays, registration lists, voting histories, all other pertinent and impertinent information available, including any shoes left at polling places.

This is where federalism kicked in. Among the thousands of pages in state codes creating election systems were all kinds of restrictions on handling voter information. In state constitutions, voting provisions will be found in Section 22 Sacred Documents.

Of course, the Democrats smelled a nationalized voting system and refused to send anything. Even sympathetic Republican states couldn’t comply. North Dakota Secretary of State Al Jaeger sadly reported that we didn’t have that kind of information so the state couldn’t help find villains. (North Dakota has no voting villains.)

Payment in advance, please

Some states charged fees for the requested records and wanted payment in advance. South Dakota wanted $2,500. None of the states gave up Social Security numbers. States built such a huge paper wall around voting data that it would have been effective on the Mexican border.

One Commission member complained that the project was marked by “obfuscation, secrecy and confusion.” Of course, you would expect a Democrat to say that even if it was true.

With a scattering of piecemeal documents, the Commission spent about a year looking for fraud. Finding none, it quietly disappeared on a dark night in D.C. The documents were last seen on one of New York’s garbage barges off the coast of Newfoundland.

But the Commission did prove one thing: there is practically no voting fraud in the United States or this presidential search would have found it.

Lloyd Omdahl is a former lieutenant governor of North Dakota and former political science professor at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.