The stink of fear

It's not exactly Atticus Finch, is it?
Why go all-out, launching a boycott campaign targeting Jones Day, and doxxing lawyers, if the whole thing is futile? If Trump can't win, then conservatives are just wasting money that won't be spent on protecting the Senate majority in Georgia?

12 comments:

Himanshu said...

All things were pre-planned and nothing else

Christopher B said...

I've been commenting to those that keep calling people realistic about Trump's chances (he's in Hail Mary territory though it's worth throwing up the ball) traitors that the documentation and scrutiny are still good things if a more even playing field results. Draw your own conclusions about those efforts being resisted.

Texan99 said...

I have real doubts whether judicially admissible evidence will invalidate enough ballots to change the result of the race. That doesn't mean, though, that some Dem machines wouldn't be horribly embarrassed, if not exposed to criminal penalties. So they have plenty to be afraid of without my having plenty to rely on for the big prize. It's still worth it to clean up the process, which has always been sullied but which just exploded in scale with the panicked COVID-justified mail-in ballot extravaganza.

E Hines said...

That doesn't mean, though, that some Dem machines wouldn't be horribly embarrassed, if not exposed to criminal penalties.

While pushing the matter is worth the price for its own sake, I'm not sanguine about embarrassment or criminal penalties. The Progressive-Democrats have shown over the last several years that there will be no criminal cases, much less penalties, under a Harris-Biden administration.

Embarrassment will be minimal as the intrinsically mendacious NLMSM continues to spike the errors and misbehaviors. Maybe a couple of (otherwise trivial) scapegoats sacrificed so support a claim of "See?" but nothing further.

What frankly worries me the most is--assuming the magnitude of the problem is as large as some are saying and evidence revealed outside of court is beginning to suggest--finding a judge or a Justice with the stones to rule accordingly rather than being unable to accept something so momentous as true and rejecting the cases.

Eric Hines

J Melcher said...

Of interest in itself but especially considering the "platform" -- NPR:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/tweak-vote

Describing rank preference voting, but more. Describing an open, transparent, ritualized system of controls, checks and balances that takes the time to let everybody who voted watch (sometimes televised) progress into the selection process.

So, polls close at 10PM on Friday February 26th, and then ... Then all hell broke loose. So what happens is we vote on the Friday, and on Saturday morning ... The votes actually get counted. So for Dublin Central ... It's this barn like building with big vaulted ceilings. Big, big hall, huge amount of noise. this cavernous hall filled with people milling about. Everybody's got clipboards ...There's people with tons of sandwiches made and ... Tea and coffee in abundance and everybody is really excited. So, shortly after 9:00 ... All These giant metal boxes of ballots come in. So the boxes are opened ... Literally they're lifted up and there is a cascade and a spilling of all this paper. Because it's all done by paper voting. We tried electronic voting in this country, and we didn't like it because it was very fast and I think we realized that the drama of an election and also the ritual of democracy gets everybody engaged and gets people watching. It's like watching a big sports game. You don't want it to be over in five minutes. And so early on here the counters are just trying to get a handle on how many first choice votes each candidate is getting. When 100% of the boxes are open and a final tally - while the ballot counters are doing this official count, there's another group of people standing next to them ... Doing their own unofficial calculations. The tallymen. These tallymen, there are several of them put forward by each candidate, and ... So they can share who the name of the person that got the number one preference. They're like, Gannon number one. Gannon, and they're just counting them up. [Later...]the counters take all those ballots, now officially sorted by first preference, and they pick up the stack for each candidate on the table and walk that stack back to ... this wooden shelving unit- ... behind the tables. About a little bit of a distance, in the center. This giant sort of cubby. Pigeon holes, just like light, flimsy, wooden boxes. And this is the sacred shrine of Irish democracy ....

The "rank preference" thing is very much what goes on at the Iowa Caucuses in the US at the start of primary season. But no (failed, untested) "Apps". PAPER BALLOTS! Collected at polling places into sealed boxes. The number of boxes is controlled. The number of voters at polling stations is recorded. The number of voters is summed and compared to the number of ballots collected. BEFORE THE VOTES are tallied the number of ballots is controlled.

I wept at how well designed the system (as described) worked. (It being NPR, the whole story might be "malarky" but still...)

Machine voting is designed to be QUICK, with accuracy and fairness and honesty all lower priority considerations. This has been true since clockwork gear switch and lever systems of the 19th century. Paper ballots are undeniably slow to process. But keeping track of physical "things" is a well understood problem with long-tested solutions. People trust that process, especially if they can see it happening in front of them.

Even if "Dominion" and others of the ilk are innocent of the accusations now being tossed around, they and other silicon vendors should be banned from US elections ever after, after this year.



Christopher B said...

J Melcher .. Iowa Dem Caucus is NOTHING like rank preference voting. It is open voting with a minimum level of support required. Anyone supporting a candidate falling below that minimum MUST either change their vote or persuade others to join, or their vote won't count. All done publicly. It's not anything close to rank preference where candidates are ranked by voters in secret before anyone knows who is ahead or behind.

Texan99 said...

When we moved to this county in 2005 it was all paper ballots. Gradually we started to use the electronic machines I was familiar with in Houston. I began to get uneasy about the security of the electronic count. We started to give voters the option of a paper ballot that would be read by a scanner, vs. the electronic tablets. I preferred the paper ballots and scanner, because there was a paper trail: the paper ballots all went into a secured box, so if the scanner was acting up, you could always go back and compare the count to a hand-count of the paper ballots. But over the years the Commissioners Court consistently voted to let the Election Administrator squeeze the paper ballots out of the process. The Election Administrator only stared blankly at the notion that someone could jigger the count. She was apparently quite honest herself, and didn't have a lot of imagination about what other people might do. She resigned a couple of months ago, and we're working with an interim administrator while looking to hire a permanent one.

douglas said...

Tex, you should have an auditor or investigator with experience in fraud come in and testify to the nature of humans and the ability to commit fraud when the issue comes on the calendar. It's important to remind people why security and chain of custody protocols are important, and why we need all those rules and redundancies.
Monster Hunter Nation had a good bit with a lot of responses of those kinds of people.

Texan99 said...

I saw that MHN piece, it was great.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Paper ballots, yes.

The continued threats might mean they have something to hide. But it could just signify that they are mean and like punishing people.

Texan99 said...

Or those could be two sides to the same personality trait.

ymarsakar said...

They actually think they can roll over Ymarsakar, Q, and Trump, all in the state of Georgia.

Are these people nuts?