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On the Matter of Elections
Outside of the old leftist stand-by of racism, I doubt there has been any subject more on the collective tongue than voting for the last few months. The noise has come from all political directions but little of it has processed much clarity, intellectual or otherwise.
A secure and valid vote is one of those necessary, vital elements if we are to practice, maintain and grow the liberty intended when our republic was founded. The Founders/Framers were wise enough not to create a strict democracy. They knew enough history not to make that mistake. They also realized that the path to that hard-to-define term “will of the people” was always an ongoing process requiring actual input from us peons in a variety of ways.
But secure, legal voting is central to not just give expression to that will but also as means of consent by those who are to be governed. No society had so formally made a government subject to that consent before in human history.
The integrity of our elections has been under a gradual assault for a while now, inch by inch. Foot by foot. But the last several months have seen the effort become not just more intense and dishonest but open and obvious even to minds as simple as mine, unless clouded by prejudice or motivated by gain.
It is difficult to convince me (well, maybe I should say impossible) that anyone working to undermine voter ID is very concerned about election integrity. They are interested in managing the outcome of elections. The same can be said of extensive early voting periods, endless streams of mail-in ballots, and several other strings in the web we have seen woven lately.
Both laws and elections should be simple and understandable. When they are not bureaucracy and “experts” are empowered and the citizen is removed farther from real decision making.
The unneeded rush to “lockdown” voting because of Covid-19 fears and concerns allowed the full-blown authoritarian in too many to be turned loose. Covid-19 does not trump state law or the Constitution. But with that as an excuse standing election law was side-stepped or purposely ignored.
I have always contended that it would be impossible to get any clear finding on extensive election fraud in the 2020 national election until well after the fact, if ever. There were too many violations of common sense security issues and far too much technology involved.
But it shouldn’t have come to that. There were clear violations of the Constitution in at least five states when election procedures were changed by someone other than the state legislature. The failure of the Supreme Court to take up that issue before the election was turning their back on a clear duty and responsibility. Those unconstitutional actions themselves made the 2020 election a farce. But it did send a clear signal that the doors were all open.
Those who chest-thump about their respect and love for that Constitution and the Rule of Law should have been both outraged and outspoken, regardless of their political leanings or candidate preference. But I feel that too many were relied upon because personalities had become more important than the document or the concept.
Voting has become less and less secure ever since the wide reliance on electronic voting. The actual vote counts from 2020 can be disputed a dozen different ways for years to come. Hopefully, a genuine forensic audit gives some clarity at some point. BUT that is a problem. The validity of a vote should not depend on a parade of conflicting “experts” speaking their own technical language.
A recount of real votes should only take a few days, at most. Open-source voting machines are open invitations to problems. The most secure and accurate election has real ballots marked by verified, legal voters that can be counted by hand under supervision. The evidence of that vote should be a solid, physical ballot that can be seen, held, and understood by any “regular” citizen.
Complexity invites deception. I feel that the complexity injected into our election system is purposeful and places its results more and more in the hands of a few. Complexity makes it possible for the recount to be just as corrupt as the election itself. If people are to believe in elections they must first understand them and plainly see their validity.
The wave of state election security laws is a grassroots reaction to the zoo that 2020 election became. The Great Virus was among us and so the letter of law was suspended. The Texas Fleebags who escaped to the safety of DC (at least for the moment) are not trying to preserve voter law. They are wanting to keep all the open violations of state election law used by Harris County (Houston) despite being told directly not to. That infection is deadlier to self-governance than any Chinese import.
I heard all my life that even a blind hog can root up an acorn every now and then. The other day Joe Biden proved the old saying in what was otherwise a nasty, deliberate attack on plain old truth and our system. Our nation is facing a grave threat, the worst since the 1860s. It is actually a multi-front attack and election security is one very dangerous thrust in that attack.
Something close to 80% of Americans know there should be voter ID. Around half of the American voters doubt the results of the 2020 election. It is not enough for a few “experts” behind closed doors to declare an election valid. It is the citizenry that has to declare an election valid IF there is to be actual self-governance.
The election of 2020 was turned into a confused mess because simple standards of law and common security were ignored. All of those confusing, wide-open aspects are now being proposed as a federalized, nation standard.
Election fraud can and does change history. A simple example can be found less than a century ago in Texas. A few days past on the Land of Confusion podcast, ToryWarWriter asked a few things about Texas politics during the era when it might have been considered part of the old “solid south” block of the Democrat Party. My answers were both short and incomplete, kinda like me.
The infamous 1948 Ballot Box 13 election was a run-off for the Democrat Senate nomination between LBJ and Coke Stevenson. Both the details and legends of that affair are pretty well documented.
Although Texas stubbornly had remained part of that “solid south” from Reconstruction, it had two distinct fractions. This had especially been true since the 1880s and the first influence of the “progressives” among those in the eastern parts of the state. For a simple explanation, one would pretty well be considered conservative today and the other far more liberal. Coke Stevenson was a popular governor and definitively a conservative. He would probably be a prime target for CNN today. LBJ was a New Deal ally of FDR and Sam Rayburn.
Ballot Box 13 in Jim Wells County not only sent Johnson on to the Senate and eventually to the White House. I feel that it began the slow turn of Texas toward the GOP.
Stevenson returned to life as a rancher and businessman but never backed another Democrat, for anything. The local elections were still determined by the Democrat primaries for another decade and a half but both Stevenson and Texas went GOP in 1952 and ’56. A majority of Texans grew less and less trustful of the Democrat Party regardless of any Reconstruction wounds, beginning with Stevenson’s “loss”. Toward the end of the ’60s, the turn had become complete.
But that is only one small way that old number 13 changed history. The deeper effect was that LBJ became president, hence the constitutionally toxic Great Society. And one can pretty well disregard the common leftist claim that without a Johnson presidency we would not have the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights bill. Most of the support for these came from the GOP and Johnson’s main argument to convince his fellow party members to vote for the measures was that passage would “give us the black (not exactly the term he used) vote for the next 200 years.”
Power was at the heart of Johnson and Democrat motives. It still is. It is a power that does not fall to the citizen but to the political class, the opposite of our original national purpose.
It is not enough to simply say that there was not “enough error or fraud to change results.” If there is one illegal ballot, there can well be two. Or three. Or……
That is the cop-out of someone who is satisfied with the result. Those actually interested in protecting our Constitution and the rule of law would stand ready to fix these matters, not mildly accept them with a “no harm, no foul” approach. Their reasoning rings hollow.
Confidence in the election is instilled by making it more difficult for those errors and those frauds to occur, not easier or more likely.
Every vote that is not legal is a vote taken from a citizen. It is a method to cancel that citizen’s right of consent to be governed. It is a breach of the basic agreement between ourselves and those who supposedly represent us.
As I have said, the present attack on our system is a widespread one across many vital fronts. We will not win this struggle simply at the ballot box. Our efforts also have to be daily and widespread across those corners of our culture of liberty which are under such an assault. But the ballot box should be a reflection of all those other things we do and the battles we fight. It is citizens whose consent is needed, not government’s. So they deserve transparency. They deserve answers, clear and honest ones. The security and integrity of elections and the important protection of our willing consent are most vital to that culture of liberty.
Published in General
That’s another aspect. Most if not all of those places that don’t allow absentee/mail voting, also have just ONE day for in-person voting.
My original reason for not liking them was that I think it’s important for people to be grounded in a place, where they live among neighbors. It’s a little different to have such a sense of place in crowded urban environments where people have good transportation, but I think it’s important anyway.
It’s good to go to the polls with neighbors rather than strangers, where there is a sense of picking our elected officials together, and managing our elections together, even though not all neighbors are of the same party. It’s harder to have and maintain such a sense in urban areas, but I think it’s worth doing anyway.
Which also means no routine absentee or mail-in voting.
What percentage of the vote did Hussein get?
Yup, that’s definitely a reason to oppose it.
I know this is in jest, but in 1995 he got 99.96 percent, and in ’02, 100 percent. I remember that 99.96 thing coming up on the news, I don’t recall the media at the time lending any legitimacy to it…but who know what would happen these days. They never seemed interested in the Maduro or Chavez elections.
:) I was unclear as to the percentage , but was pretty sure it was around 80 million total
Different Hussein. Same ol’ Hussein.
I like the idea of making vote-by-mail folks put a fingerprint on their ballot. It is reasonably anonymous, yet perfectly traceable and hard to fake.
Good ideas, so I’m not very hopeful.
The problem with that solution is that it makes the ballot traceable back to the original voter which the system is designed to prevent. Now, it could be that the voter would place their fingerprint on the ballot carrier envelope which contains the ballot but not on the ballot itself. That would serve a similar purpose, and the ballot sent to a person would include an ink pad and instructions on how to correctly fingerprint the ballot carrier envelope.
In the end, once that ballot is removed from the ballot carrier envelope there isn’t a way to tie it back to the individual voter. Same as with the ballots cast in person. That is why the audit and controls have to be on what happens BEFORE the envelope is opened, because once it is…any traceability is lost.
The records would need to be checked not only to make sure that the fingerprint on the ballot/envelope matches the voter registration, but also that the fingerprint appears in the voter registrations of ALL states, only once.
This is getting to be quite an elaborate and expensive system you’re suggesting. For every election with more than a 2 or 3 percentage point margin of victory, which is most of them, it’s wasteful. Also, it won’t be lost on law enforcement agencies that a huge database of voters’ fingerprints could help solve a few crimes. Whether that would be a feature or a bug, I’m not sure.
Well I think the inked-finger thing is probably better all around, as long as only in-person voting is allowed. But if you’re going to allow for widespread mail-in voting, inked fingers don’t really work, do they? I would prefer that there be no mail-in voting at all, but if you’re going to allow it, then people need to know that they have volunteered to have their fingerprint on file too.
If we don’t fix elections we’ll continue getting law enforcement that does whatever is required to serve the politicians in power and we won’t be able to change it.