Sometime between the date of the 2020 election and January 6th, we can remember asking why America doesn’t have elections that are as secure as the ones in Botswana or Sudan. Can’t we do better than Uganda?

Apparently… we can’t. We’re stuck with these electronic voting machines and counting machines and mail-in voting for the foreseeable future.

Other countries that care about democracy are not as stupid about this as we are. For example, the Philippines just banned Smartmatic voting machines in their country.

Smartmatic, you probably remember, is one of the two voting machine companies that are trying to sue the My Pillow Guy, Mike Lindell, into oblivion. The other company is Dominion Voting Systems.

Smartmatic machines have been used in the Philippines since 2010. But a recent scandal has led the Philippines Commission on Elections to ban the machines going forward. Smartmatic machines won’t be used during the 2024 elections there.

The head of the Commission on Elections has been a guy named Andres Bautista for many years. From 2010 through 2016 (at least), the Philippines took bids from voting machine companies to try to save money. Andres Bautista is accused of taking a bribe from Smartmatic in 2016, in order to ensure that the company won the contract that year.

It turns out that Andres Bautista was under investigation by the US government for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering. As a result of that investigation, the government in the Philippines discovered that Bautista had set up a shell company back in 2016 and that Smartmatic transferred a bribe payment to Bautista through that. Who does this guy think he is? Joe Biden?

The Biden regime, oddly enough, is asking the Philippines for financial records of transactions involving Smartmatic and Bautista. The Commission on Elections wrote:

“It is noteworthy that Bautista, who served as the Chairman of the Commission, was formally charged in September 2023, in connection with allegations of receiving bribes in exchange for awarding a contract for election machines to Smartmatic Corp.”

Bautista denies any wrongdoing, and he has not had his day in court yet. But that’s not the point. The fact that he has been charged with taking bribes from Smartmatic on more than one occasion is enough to taint the electoral process in the Philippines. As a result, the Commission on Elections banned Smartmatic machines going forward.

“The charges against Smartmatic and former Chairman Bautista are of public knowledge and tend to cause speculation and distrust of the electoral process,” the Commission’s report continued.

“Given the gravity of allegations related to bribery and compromised procurement processes, as independently determined by foreign bodies, the Commission recognizes the imminent threat to the strength and integrity of our democratic processes.”

Just the idea that public in the Philippines would lose trust in their elections over this scandal—which is only allegations at this point—was enough for the country to give Smartmatic the boot. Don’t you wish that any elected officials in our own country felt the same way?

It’s not as if the Philippines is some bastion of integrity. It’s in the bottom 25% of the poorest countries on earth. It’s impoverished and like all impoverished, Third World developing nations, there’s a lot of corruption there. But they just took a bigger step toward securing their 2024 elections than most Republican legislatures here in the United States have since the 2020 election was stolen from us.

Some states have taken concrete steps to shore up their elections since then, but we’re still seeing a lot of problems. The machines break down in Republican districts during EVERY election, as we saw in Maricopa, Yuma, and Mohave Counties in Arizona last year. Just last month, machines were caught switching votes in several counties in Pennsylvania. No one in either party really trusts the electronic machines.

Yet when was the last time you heard a sitting Member of Congress say that we ought to ban these machines in order to restore trust in our elections? Why don’t we ban mail-in voting while we’re at it? Why don’t we require states to count all the votes on election night by hand, like we did for 250 years before these machines came along?

It tells you a lot about the direction the US is heading when Third World countries and banana republics care more about the integrity of their elections than our leaders do.