Suppose you are the administrator of the only hospital in your county. You have been notified that during today’s operation, the lights flashed repeatedly, the suction machine stopped working, the anesthesia was ineffective, the equipment was lost, and the nurse or surgeon may have done something wrong.

Fortunately, although the standards of care are not always followed, you are told that everyone works together and the operation is completed without any obvious harm to the patient. The patient has been told and is visibly upset. They continue to say that they have lost trust in the hospital and may never use it again.

If you were given these facts, what would you do? I suspect that someone will move on, as if nothing happened. To do so would be gross negligence. Instead, you will contact the patient immediately and sincerely apologize for the unacceptable procedure and assure them that a full investigation is underway to find all mechanical, process, and human errors. Only by conducting such an investigation and remedying all the shortcomings can there be hope of restoring confidence in the institution.

We have just gone through an election and encountered many problems, including the use of magnetic tape to "cure" the machine's broken ballots, a defective thumb drive that could not upload ballots, a mismatch in counts, and a bag that mysteriously "appeared" a few days after the election. vote.

We thank the Voter Services Department and the lawyers of the Democratic and Republican parties for their hard work in solving the problem. But we cannot stop there. To do so would be gross negligence. The damage has been done. It is understandable that confidence has been lost.

Some recent columns indicate that the people requesting the investigation are "conspiracy theorists." This is unwise, unreasonable and insulting. In protecting every sacred ballot, one mistake is too much. In order to ensure that this does not happen again and restore the trust of voters, a full investigation must be launched.

We are very pleased that at the Election Committee meeting held on November 22, the committee members unanimously acknowledged the seriousness of the problems that occurred in the past elections. We thank Marian Moskowitz, the chairman of the committee, for instructing the county administrator Robert Kagel to “continue to execute the plan” to bring all parties together in December and assist with external companies Develop proposals for investigating these issues.

We look forward to working with the Commissioner, Voter Services, Chester County Democracy Committee, and the Liberal Party to ensure that these mistakes do not repeat themselves, and our county once again represents its well-known standards of excellence.

Dr. Gordon Eck is Chairman of the Chester County Republican Committee

Sign up for email newsletters