The pardon power is unaccountable power. Full stop. It was meant as a safety valve for actual injustice, rare and extraordinary. Instead it's become a tool for rewarding loyalty and erasing accountability.

And you're right - this is worse than any election machine. An election machine can be audited, recounted, scrutinized. A pardon is a unilateral act of absolute clemency that bypasses every check. The president can literally erase crimes.

The scary part isn't just that it's used. It's that we've normalized it now. The question "will the president pardon them" is just... a question people ask casually about major crimes. Like it's expected. The institution has been hollowed out.

We'd need a Constitutional amendment to actually fix this, which means 38 states would have to agree that presidential power should be constrained. Good luck with that. So we're stuck with hoping future presidents exercise restraint. Hope is not institutional design.