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The Election Mess Is a Feature, Not a Bug
People thinking there will be a “red wave” tonight are going to be disappointed. Not because a lot of people won’t vote Republican. It’s because our elections are no longer resolved on election night. They are resolved through a long, agonizing street fight in the courts over what votes get counted and what don’t. I won’t be staying up to watch the returns tonight.
That’s the point of the Democrat push for mail-in voting, early voting and the general resistance to any voting integrity laws. I don’t think it is necessarily because they have specific plans for fraud. It’s because a chaotic election that gets resolved through post-election bureaucracies will always favor them, the party of bureaucrats. The left is always about results not process, and if destroying the process gets them better results, then so be it.
It’s laughable seeing pundits talk about races where the Republican is up +2 or +3, and what it will mean for congressional majorities on election night. A critical election where the Republican wins by +2 on election night will not be resolved on election night. It will be resolved months from now, after the election bureaucrats pull every trick they know to push the Dem over the line. All the loose voting rules just given them room to maneuver, that is their only point. It’s disgusting and embarrassing, but that is where we are now, and I can’t watch it anymore. It’s too nauseating.
Published in General
Expect to see a lot of this:
And the Regime will punish you severely if you suggest something’s not quite right about that.
Reports of voting problems in AZ, IN, NJ. And in MI people are being told when they show up to vote they already voted absentee.
F#cking Banana Republic.
Even though elections are managed at the state level, it seems like there should be some accountability or procedures for preventing these absurd delays. In this day and age, it’s ridiculous to have to wait days, never mind months, to learn the results. I’m getting sick of it, too, JClimacus.
Maricopa County , what a surprise!!!
This is incredible! Aren’t these machines tested ahead of time? This is nuts.
Surprise, surprise, surprise (not!)
https://ricochet.com/1334865/they-may-need-extra-time-to-count-the-votes-if-you-know-what-i-mean/
Remember the days before we had high speed computers to count the votes; and they were all tallied up by the end of Election night.
That must have been back when we were a third world country.
What? You think they didn’t?
The speed mechanical dials and pulling the lever!
After the 2000 election, Florida solved this issue by changing their state law to have mail-in ballots counted as they came in. As soon as the polls close, Florida releases the results of all of the mail-in ballots. The election day ballots are usually counted within two hours. By an hour and a half after the polls close, we know who won in Florida. There is a solution, if you want it.
I voted. Never seen so many poll workers standing around doing nothing. Serious DMV vibes.
I had to help an older lady get around. She couldn’t stand for long and there was no line, just a big unorganized blob. I’m surprised that one of the numerous “volunteers” couldn’t at least offer a chair or direct the crowd.
Voting is a peculiar institution…
I’ve been saying for two years that I would reserve judgement on the state of our Republic until election day 2022. Well it is here. If the Republicans “narrowly lose” all races, it will be hard for me not to believe that the Republic is lost and that the path to power for Republicans and Conservatives has been blocked. I don’t know what will happen then or what I will do. If, on the other hand, historical norms hold and are amplified by the current misery index resulting in significant Republican wins, then I hope that I will stop living in a perpetual state of anger and uneasiness over the future of this country. I would sincerely like to give that up.
That’s my point. The Democrats don’t want it. They want the chaos, because it benefits them.
Running secure, transparent elections that are decided on election night isn’t hard. It was done consistently for decades until recently. Then excuses were found for all sorts of things like mail-in voting that inevitably increases the chaos. COVID was the alleged reason for the mail-in voting, but COVID is largely over now but mail-in voting will be with us forever.
The chaos is not a bug. It’s a feature.
“Federal monitors looking for potential civil rights violations and voter intimidation will fan out to 64 jurisdictions in 24 states, a marked increase from the presidential election two years ago when DOJ sent monitors to 44 jurisdictions in 18 states.”
The DOJ announced this and has done it before, except they monitored outside the polling places; now they say they want to be inside. Florida and other states are politely telling them they are not permitted (by FL law) to monitor inside. Just more federal intimidation.
This is absolute nonsense. What does it mean then if there is a red wave? Quit sowing doubt when it isn’t called for.
The time it takes to count votes is a feature of the underlying state laws. For example, many states like PA, AZ, and WI don’t allow counting early votes until election day or even after the polls close. That makes it take much longer than necessary to count the votes. But it doesn’t mean that it’s fraudulent. It’s also something the GOP legislatures could fix, but didn’t try to.
If the time it takes to count votes is a problem, the push by GOP in places like AZ and NV to hand-count ballots would make it worse. It would take weeks to complete a hand count of elections. These are supposedly efforts to secure the vote, but will only worsen the problem through more delay.
I really can’t believe that I’m seeing election catastrophe mongering on both the Left and Right today. On the Left, today is the last election ever. On the Right, it’s this kind of defeatism where you assume that it will be stolen.
This type of stuff has to stop. It’s a sickness that infects all sides. Our elections are largely run locally. By people who are our neighbors or who live, work, and go to church just like we do. Do you think they are all duped into massive fraud? Or do you only believe that the bad guys are on the other side or in some other location?
Let’s wait and see what happens today. The random reports of issues aren’t proof of some grand conspiracy. They are almost certainly do to human or mechanical error. I’d be willing to bet that they happen all the time, we just hear about each and every one now because of social media. Try to relax and see what happens before jumping to conclusions.
No matter what, the sun will still come up tomorrow.
I know Florida told ’em to get lost. Did other states?
I sure hope I’m wrong and wake up tomorrow to things like Fetterman conceding an Oz win, with Oz ahead +2%. But I doubt it. It’s part of the Democrat playbook now to never concede and to always lawyer up. Again, that’s the point of the chaos. It gives the lawyers something to work with.
People don’t realize the damage our pathetic elections are doing. I’m not just talking about the will of the people being thwarted by shenanigans. A large part of our standing in the world is our reputation for the rule of law, honest police and courts, transparent and trustworthy elections, all backed up by a big military. It’s the reason the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and has consistent and enduring demand around the world. We have been able to run large trade deficits for decades because people want dollars, and will give us real stuff for them.
Holding dollars is in an expression of faith in the United States. Lately we have been doing everything we can to undermine that faith, with our ridiculous elections near the top of the list. At some point the rest of the world will realize that we are no longer anything special, just another country with more or less functioning institutions that involve degeneration and corruption consistent with the rest of the world, rather than being a level above the rest of the world. Then the confidence in the dollar will come into question, and the loss of confidence may happen very quickly. The result will be big, big trouble.
This is the only other state I could identify:
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft fired back on Twitter as well:
I am (almost) 60 years old. Elections were not like this in the 1970s and 1980s. There weren’t paper ballots but mechanical voting machines and nearly everyone who voted, voted on election day. The machines were specifically designed to replace paper ballots and make fraud difficult, which they did. There was no hand-counting of ballots over days and weeks, with opportunities to inject new ballots, or worrying over postmarks and dates on mail-in votes. Pretty much every election was called on election night.
There was nothing wrong with that system. It was the envy of the world. Now we have paper ballots, mail-in ballots, “early voting”, and other “innovations” that simply inject chaos into the system.
The false alternative presented is that you either accept the current chaos as acceptable, or you are a kook believing in a “grand conspiracy.” There are other alternatives, like the one I presented: There is no grand conspiracy, but the simple understanding by Democrats that the looser and more chaotic elections are, the more they benefit.
Mail-in and early voting is not decided locally. It is decided on a state level, by state bureaucrats. A Democrat Secretary of State understands that mail-in and early voting is likely to produce more Democrat votes (by fair means of foul, who cares), so he initiates it. It’s that simple.
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all have Republican Legislatures and all of them refuse to allow any counting of mail-in votes before the polls close. Coincidence? I don’t think so. It helps the narrative that Democrats are stealing the election.
There is, but you’re certainly not going to get it with your gal Hobbs.
John’s son? Politics sure is an incestuous business.
So you believe in conspiracy theories, but only when the conspirators are Republicans?
As we both suspected, Jay is John Ashcroft’s son.
There’s no curbside voting? There is here. Pull up to the precinct, ask for a ballot while sitting in your car, verify you are registered, and then vote. They put your marked ballot in an envelope and it gets counted later with absentee ballots at the precinct. There is no central counting of absentees. It’s done in the precinct.
What Leave it to Beaver fairytale world do you live in?
And Democrat governors with the power to veto.
I want to be clear: I think we can improve our systems! I would like everyone to follow Florida’s lead because they seem to have it locked down. I also don’t like early voting much at all.
It wasn’t until 2020 that mail-in really flipped to Dems and that was in large part due to covid hysteria. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.