From a comment to the Manhattan Contrarian's discourse on blue basket-case cities whose people-helping warm fuzzy charitable organizations function primarily as vote factories ("a/k/a Tammany Hall poverty pimps"):
Ok, Trump has an unlikeable personality, but his actual record in accomplishing conservative objectives is easily the best since Reagan and arguably superior since he did it in 4 years with the threat of impeachment hanging over his administration from day 1. And your take is that Mr. and Mrs. Middle of the Road or Mr. and Mrs. Traditional Republican would rather vote for a senile, corrupt, and Leftist Joe Biden for the big job because they prefer higher energy prices, higher taxes, Constitution ignoring judges, open borders, bending over to please China, and the threat of Supreme Court packing and two new Democrat states rather than put up with 4 more years of ugly Tweets? Yea that makes a lot more sense than massive vote fraud coming exclusively out of inner city Democrat run districts.Also, cheerful thoughts from another commenter on why the fraud exploded this year while 2016 kept it down to the usual dull roar:
2016 might well have been the result of Democrats thinking it would be such a landslide, that it wasn't worth the risk of fully engaging 'the apparatus.'
2020 may well be payback along with a YOLO risk mentality, which will hopefully make it possible to nail them this time.
Hopefully this is not to far afield, topic wise-
ReplyDeleteWhat I find very concerning are comments from leftist leaders that Trump, Trump supporters, Trump "enablers",people who donated to Trump, or spoke well of Trump, all need to be put on a blacklist , silenced,dismissed, punished.
This is well beyond policy issue. It is eliminationist rhetoric.
Historically things go pear-shaped with a vengeance when words like this become commonplace.
I notice confusion in the media reporting environment between "ballots" and "votes".
ReplyDeleteThis is more confused in situations where a voting machine, whether a clockwork register based machine or an electronic -digital machine, records results. In such a case there may be no distinct "ballot" to count. Even so, there is or should be an increment for each time the machine is used -- whichever tally for whatever candidate or measure gets an increment in votes.
The count of ballots should be checked to ensure a match to the number of voters presenting themselves to the process. On election day, a voter ideally walks in and trades a signature for a ballot. The count of signatures should match the number of ballots issued. Early voting is little different. For mail/absentee ballots, a count of ballots requested may not (though it should) match the count of ballots issued. And neither can be relied upon to match the number of ballots returned. However, any mismatch should never show more ballots returned than requested or issued.
A fair and transparent counting process would have as a first critical step a group of adversarial observers count -- blindly, without access to or regard for the "vote" -- the number of ballots meeting legal requirements. If there are 12345 ballots, there will be a total of 12345 or fewer votes. If ballots are straggling in from remote locations via unreliable couriers, the vote count is delayed until all ballots are counted. Only once it has been agreed that the contest can be decided with the recognized ballots, THEN the votes ON the ballots are sorted and counted. So even in a wildly disparate precinct, announcing a seemingly preposterous result (12100 for Yellow and 245 for Purple, or whatever) the results will fall in a constrained and expected range. (Could just as easily be 12000 for Yellow, 200 for Purple, 100 for Plaid, and 45 blanks. Every vote is counted, and every BALLOT is accounted for.)
Similarly the number of ballot collecting apparatuses should be controlled and agreed upon. There are X number of machines. There are N polling places and they've filled Q ballot-boxes. The very notion that a whole group of ballots in boxes or on thumb-drives can go mysteriously missing, or just as mysteriously appear after early vote counts show trends, indicates a tolerance for fraud that we should abhor.
In Midland Texas in January of this year a minor election for a school district's bond/borrowing authority went through FOUR distinct results over several weeks as ballots went astray and showed up, were miscounted and recounted. This in a state and county where actual physical paper ballots were controlled in order to allow heightened scrutiny. In a city where machine politics control the literal machinery of democracy, I see little reason to trust "vote" tallies with unknown and ever-changing quantities of "ballots" still in limbo.
I'm open to the idea that there has been election fraud on the part of Democrats but I don't think the argument that moderate voters wouldn't vote for Biden because he will bring:
ReplyDeletehigher energy prices, higher taxes, Constitution ignoring judges, open borders, bending over to please China, and the threat of Supreme Court packing and two new Democrat states
holds water. I believe most voters don't realize that's what a Biden Administration will mean. I imagine most moderates (Republican and Democrat) who voted for Biden think he's a standard moderate Democrat who will implement some non-fossil-fuel projects; raise taxes only on the rich and corporations; will appoint moderate judges; etc. I imagine an awful lot of people are unaware of the good stuff that has happened during Trump's tenure and of how Biden will roll that back. I'm thinking particularly of the Mideast peace deals and the US no longer being reliant on OPEC.
At the same time, they probably think the political temperature will drop with a President who isn't so "in your face". They're wrong about all of this, of course, but I don't think it's unimaginable that moderates voted for Biden over Trump out of ignorance and inattention.
Parenthetically, I am looking forward to laughing when the people I know who voted for Biden start complaining about gas prices.
Elise
Alternate take on 2016
ReplyDeleteThe apparatus was engaged but it wasn't focused on the Presidential race. I'm guessing that large amounts occur before Election Day which limits the number of simultaneous targets. I think I remember Michigan attempting a 'recount' that had to be abandoned due to poor record keeping and other irregularities. It was Michigan and Pennsylvania then, too. Hillary chose to forgo the recount rather than reveal the extent of the fraud after her team was read into Crossfire Hurricane.
Unlikeable personality....the personality that someone projects on television can be very different from their real personality. The cases where the real Joe Biden shines through haven't been so warm & cuddly.
ReplyDeleteLike the part where he makes his drug-addicted son his bagman, then leaves him hanging when he's caught?
ReplyDelete"Like the part where he makes his drug-addicted son his bagman, then leaves him hanging when he's caught?"
ReplyDeleteThat too, it seems...I was thinking of his various strange and incoherent insults, like 'lying dog-faced pony soldier.'
We had a pretty good group in my Boy Scout troop, but at one point we got a couple of kids who thought they were real tough guys. One of them liked to cuss, but he just couldn't do it right, his streams of attempted profanity were just plain weird. Biden reminded me of this kid.