Lawmakers, at the very least, can say they tried.

We’ll find out soon enough if Tuesday’s move by the General Assembly to tighten absentee ballot activity has any teeth. As one Bladen County Board of Elections member said at a meeting later that day, “If people want to cheat, they’re going to cheat.”

The proposed new law, which might have the governor’s signature on it by the time this is published, uses information from a state Board of Elections probe into activities that were centered here in Bladen County. That investigation’s evidence showed Bladenboro’s McCrae Dowless worked for the Rev. Mark Harris, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, and gathered hundreds of absentee ballots from voters with the help of assistants.

Those helping him testified they were asked to collect blank or incomplete ballots, forge signatures on them and fill in votes for local candidates. Eleven people face criminal charges. A new election was held for that District 9 race, as well as two other races specific to Bladen County, including one for county commissioner.

In the redo, the county commissioner race drew 1,348 votes and was decided by four. In November, it had drawn 4,553 votes and was decided by 233.

Does every vote matter? You betcha!

But voter turnout always reminds us not everyone believes that, or cares enough about political leadership. Just look at the difference from November, which wasn’t necessarily all that good, to May.

“Secure elections are the most fundamental tenet of a democracy, and the policies we enacted today are intended to ensure the activity that took place last year can never happen again,” said state Sen. Ralph Hise. He’s a Republican from Mitchell County, and a key sponsor of the bill.

That sounds fine for a press release, but “never” is a tough get. Nonetheless, we applaud the effort.

We also applaud the tie-in to the new law for photo identification by voters.

We’ve heard the tired arguments saying photo ID is a knock against a certain demographic of voters. It is not. We saw as much last year during our Empty Stocking Fund; whites, blacks and Hispanics came through, 100 percent of which had a photo ID and were presented a voucher to help their kids at Christmas.

We hope the senator from the mountains is right, that ballot harvesting never happens again. But that’s just one element of cheating when it comes time to vote.

And folks here tell us election hanky-panky has been doing on for decades, whether it’s money under the table or something else.

There’s not one sweeping change to be made that will fix corrupt politics in this county. It’ll take steps.

Tuesday was one in the right direction.

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