“Those Who Cast The Votes Decide Nothing. Those Who Count The Votes, Decide Everything” – Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin, Circa 1950Picture this:
It's in the fourth year of a wildly controversial presidential term. The current president is fiery, speaks bluntly and sometimes foolishly, has a record of success along with a record of repeatedly antagonizing his political opponents both in his party and among the opposition, and he is strongly disliked by many in the political ecosphere... reporters, analysts, pontificators... because he does not seek their approval or their advice. In fact, he often disregards and ridicules it, to the consternation of the so-called political establishment and to the delight of his base. His base is comprised of mostly lower and middle income White and minority voters who value independence, identify themselves as religious, and who generally support social and financial conservative values... small business owners, semi-skilled and skilled workers... as well as the majority of law enforcement and military members. He does not garner much support or respect among the professional class, those in academia, the tech industry, the financial sector, and especially from the media and entertainment industries. He is the butt of most late night comedy show hosts, and much if not most of their nightly routines center on finding something to ridicule the president about. The opposition party has tried and failed to remove him from office repeatedly, first by pushing a baseless investigation of him as a foreign agent based upon a known-false document prepared by the other presidential candidate during the last election cycle as if it were true, then by impeaching him on a party-line vote in the House on false, specious accusations of abuse of power and obstruction of justice only to see the impeachment fail on a party-line vote in the Senate. Neither the baseless collusion investigation or the baseless impeachment had wings once they became known as baseless, and thus have not been referred to by the opposition party against the president during his re-election campaign. The economy made a remarkable turnaround under this president's lead, reaching historic highs, then the nation and the world was hit by a pandemic caused by a virus from China that quickly spread world-wide with 10X the fatality rate of the common flu. The actions taken to combat this pandemic have significantly and negatively affected the world's economy; the nation's economy has also experienced a significant contraction due to the curtailing of economic activity as a preventative response to the pandemic.
In this environment, the primary season was abbreviated and the opposition kept any one candidate from taking an insurmountable lead until April, when all but the front-runner and the second-place candidate dropped out and endorsed the front-runner, ensuring the second-place candidate who openly supported socialism would not win for the second election in a row. Thus, the front-runner's eventual ascension to the nomination was inevitable. Yet, there were problems. The nominee had not done well in primary debates; many questioned his mental capabilities due to his performance and his advanced age of 77. Yet, the consensus among political ecosphere was that the nominee was the candidate who would best appeal to the American public based on his projected 'likable' persona and his political experience. In order to appeal to the special interest groups that comprise the Party faithful, the African-American woman primary candidate was chosen for the VP position. The idea was to create a 'balanced' ticket that appealed to all of the party's constituencies... men, women, White, or People of Color... while also being deemed preferable to the two distasteful current office-holders who were both openly White, male, conservative, and Christian (thus, bigoted, racist and homophobic). But it wasn't enough. The party had lost the last election even though their candidate won the nationwide popular vote. Typical party constituencies... working-class, union members, even minority voters... could not be relied upon. What to do?
What if... the current pandemic was used to justify the wholesale indiscriminate mailing out of ballots to all registered voters whether requested or not? What if a subset of those ballets were duplicated, say, ballots for registered voters who had not voted in the past couple of elections, and stashed away? What if the election WERE held, the mail-in ballots plus day-of-voting ballots resulted in the party's candidate losing to the current office-holder? Well, we know who voted because we have their ballots... and thus we know who hasn't yet voted. We can bet that the vast majority of registered voters who didn't vote are represented in our stash... and we don't need them all. Just enough. So, we pause the voting, use our list of returned votes to exclude those from our stash, and take enough votes from our stash, mark them for the votes that matter in the time we have (mostly the presidential ballot, maybe in a few states throw in a senator because we're not worried about the House... no way we're losing that!) and throw them into the mix? What would that look like? Of course, we can't let observers see all this, so we block windows, we sequester them away so they can't look closely at piles of ballots we bring in from the stash or we can mix them in with ordinary ballets, we tell observers to go home because we're done counting... and when they go home we resume counting.
It would look like the incumbent is leading with significant margins in several states, only to see that lead whittle away and then disappear, giving the election in these states to our candidate. It would look like the vote swinging in favor of our presidential candidate, but lower races on the ballot not changing so that state races don't change and most Senate and House races don't change. Remember, we don't have to do this in every state, or even every precinct or county in every state... just enough precincts and counties in just enough states to push the election our way.
I'm not saying this is what happened, I'm saying that it certainly looks like what happened. And, brought to us by the party that vigorously opposes any form of establishing certainty that a registered voter cast the vote being counted, denying full transparency and openness on the vote tabulation process, and pushing processes and practices that only enhance the capability for vote fraud. The same party that tried to tell us that the Russians changed the course of the 2016 election yet denies any such thing could possibly have happened in 2020. Or, that 150K+/- ballots suddenly appearing in the middle of the night, almost all for their candidate (which is statistically highly unlikely) is normal. The problem is, we don't know and we CAN'T know that the election was fair, that only legitimate votes were counted... because one party doesn't want us to know and has done what it could to ensure we don't know and will NEVER know. That is the problem. Joe Biden has declared himself as the winner and the media is supporting him, yet Joe and the media know that the election results are not finalized... but they are trying to create the impression that the election is over when it's not. Why?
I would like to live in a country where, whether my candidate wins or loses, I have full and complete confidence in the integrity of the election system and processes. I cannot say that today, can you? THAT is the problem. The solution is simple: do in the US what we did to ensure fair and honest elections in Iraq. Make the first Tuesday in November a mandatory federal holiday (get rid of one of the other ones), require everyone to vote in person absent a valid reason for a mailed ballot, require voter ID (driver's license, passport) at the polls, put the voter's thumbprint on their ballot at the polls (have an ink pad in the booth, they thumbprint the ballot before leaving the booth and this is checked against the voter's thumbprint on record by the ballot-registering computer), provide voters a receipt for their ballot with their recorded votes, require ID for registration including a valid government ID (driver's license, passport), expire voter registrations every five years and require re-registration otherwise the voter is removed from the rolls to clean out the moved and dead voters. This would support automatic ballot confirmation, reduce the cost and effort of voting, ensure that only qualified citizens voted, and let us know who won the election by the end of the day. You know one party would be supporting this, while the other party would vigorously oppose it... and you know why, having seen what has happened during this election cycle. Because campaigns, platforms, positions, outreach... none of it matters if you control a voting process that is open to fraud.
