We still don't know the outcome of yesterday's elections. However, we know enough to be sure that many of the infrastructural and procedural problems with the 2020 elections have not yet been satisfactorily resolved. Voting in some states appears to have been marred by difficulties, and Arizona's electoral system has now become something of a national joke in that respect. Why can't they get it right? Why are Maricopa County's electoral officials so inept and/or incompetent? Verily, the mind doth boggle . . .
I think Tucker Carlson made a good point.
Fox News star Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night ... [claimed] that the use of electronic voting machines “shakes people’s faith in the system” and shows America is “not serious about democracy.”
. . .
“And what happened today in Maricopa County, where some huge percentage of voting machines… 30 percent, they claim these are Dominion voting machines, but it almost doesn’t matter,” Carlson insisted. “Electronic voting machines didn’t allow people to vote apparently.”
. . .
“Whatever you think of it, the cause of it, it shakes people’s faith in the system,” Carlson continued. “That’s an actual threat to democracy. The core problem: We’re not serious about democracy if we’re using electronic voting machines. You’re going to have these moments where everybody in the country fears volatility because one side doesn’t believe the result is real.”
Claiming that distrust in voting machines runs on “both sides” and is not “just the crazy right,” Carlson said he hoped there would be a “bipartisan” demand to ban electronic voting machines and “require voting IDs.”
There's more at the link.
I can only endorse Carlson's comments above. There's a reason Canada and many European nations reject the use of vote-counting automation. It's because it's simply too easy to interfere with or hack, and is therefore untrustworthy. They'd rather go with paper ballots, counted by hand, in constituencies small enough that they can count their votes within a few hours of the polls closing - not giant county-wide processing facilities where everything takes longer, is more complex, and costs more. What's more, if there are issues with the totals, it's a simple matter to recount the paper ballots, with observers able to see and hear everything that goes on. Transparency does away with trust issues on the spot.
Some political pundits also have egg on their faces. Many forecast a Republican "red wave" that simply has not emerged. I'd like to know why that happened - the miscalculation, I mean. Where were they getting their data? Clearly, it wasn't accurate. One hopes they'll learn from their mistakes, but being journalists and politicians, that's doubtful. They never seem to learn from anything, much less their own mistakes. "My mind's made up - don't confuse me with the facts!"
As for our nation's Congressional representatives and Senators . . . nothing could more clearly illustrate that we're a house divided. The "United" States aren't. Far too many individual States are divided against themselves. Cities are divided against rural areas. Old are divided against young. Races are divided against each other - aided and abetted, let's remember, by identity politics. I have dwindling hopes that our nation can survive as a constitutional republic. Too many groups want to run it by "pure" democracy, disregarding constitutional restrictions and balances. That's a very comfortable thing for a 51% majority, and a very uncomfortable one for a 49% minority.
Finally, there's the electorate. Pennsylvania can serve as an example for the whole. How anyone there could vote for a Senator - irrespective of political party - who's clearly even more mentally damaged and impaired than President Biden is utterly beyond me. Have they lost their minds? Do they really want such a Senator making national decisions in their name?
Nothing more clearly illustrates that voters can be manipulated like so many mindless drones, driven like cattle to the slaughterhouse. That should scare the hell out of any thinking person, of any and every partisan perspective.
The late, great H. L. Mencken reminded us of that.
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
Indeed.
Peter
14 comments:
I can say four things about my home state of PA.
First, Philly, and all the former industrial/union cities (Pittsburgh, Scranton, Harrisburg) are still under democrat control - despite a dwindling democrat citizenship in many cases. Philadelphia is notoriously corrupt and incompetent.
Second, they managed to hide Fetterman's obvious imparment until the debate. The debate was pushed back until the mail in voting grift was already well underway. A great many people regret doing that now.
Third, NJ and NY are screwed up and expensive to live in. Masses of people have moved in to Bucks. Montgomery and other counties and changed the demographics and voting habits. Democrats flee the consequences of their voting, but are so completely lacking in self awareness to change them.
Fourth, Oz was a crap candidate. He is a carpetbagger - from New Jersey no less. He is tainted by association with Opera/Hollywood. He is not America 1st - he voted in the recent Turkish election for pete sake! Barnet got screwed buy Trump's endorsement and party maneuvering.
Finally, McConnell is a problem. He played games with dolling out money so he could keep his leathery grip on his position in the senate. He prefers a a GOP loss to him loosing leadership in the Senate - he is officially an enemy. The Az senate race might be the most worst example.
Pennsylvania, the brain-damaged state with the brain-damaged senator. How appropriate.
The reason for the election victorys of the demoncrats is made clear in scripture. Read Romans 1:18 thru 32. ---ken
Tentatively, it looks like the discrepancies in expectation come down to the youth vote.
Some people are blaming mail-in-ballots; personally, I'm inclined to blame abortion, which may not have been a top issue for "likely voters", but most of them aren't affected by abortion laws anyways.
The Republican Party, as a whole, needs a consistent and unified position on abortion that isn't simply "Ban it", and which addresses people's concerns.
Let's be real for a second. Most of the right doesn't really give a shit about abortion. Abortion, for the right, is like vegetarianism for the left; it's almost all driven by a handful of very loud people, and the majority are quietly shamed into silence about it. They'll still go out and have a hamburger, mind, but they'll feel guilty about it afterwards.
Now imagine that the left actually did try to ban meat consumption, and what that would do to the election. That's what the right has run on.
I expect over the next few years the Republicans are ultimately going to come down on the same basic policy positions as Europe; legal in the first trimester, and after that it requires some kind of exceptional circumstance (rape, incest, health of the mother, non-viable pregnancy). DeSantis has the first part; the obvious exceptions are only a matter of time, and will come with names like "Sally's Law", after the individual whose case exemplifies why the exception is necessary.
The question is how many elections are lost in the meantime catering to what is, ultimately, a relatively small part of what should be a growing Republican coalition, but which otherwise is going to be stillborn.
That coalition-that-should-be is a big deal; the banner of the right should be a unification of a broad class of people, not an insistence on reifying the insane moral posturing of a minority. That's the shit the left is already serving up; people want an alternative.
Crackpot, I might agree with you except for the part where almost no national Republicans and not a lot of state Republicans were running on banning abortion. The left, however, ran ads against just about every Republican claiming that they wanted to completely ban it. The media let them get away with it. The general public supports at a 70+% level the post 15 week or so ban. The left wants unlimited abortion. To the extent that it affected the election it was based on flat out lies.
Peter, I heard it over 70 years ago put in a simpler fashion. "Nobody ever lost a plug nickel underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
Perhaps this reveals that those of us who claim to be above average intelligence are below average in guts.
Well, I was figuring that the Demoncraps were planning on throwing the election, Biden resigning so kneepads could "Select Shillery" as Vice President then resign making her "Time has COME" as President of the Titanic.
A mixed election is sand in the wheels of the World Economic Forum's you'll own nothing and BE Happy". Not a lot of sand if the WEF plan is reducing the useless eaters by a small nuclear exchange between Russia and America.
Some facts remain, the ole Mississippi is too low for food transport (SO Beans, Wheat, Corn is sitting on the ground with tarps IN THE RAIN instead of moving to markets), fertilizer plants are shutting down due to price of natural gas, Truckers are nearly broke from high diesel prices, my fuel bill for winter has doubled SO FAR, refuels still ahead if it's a harsh winter.
OH, and I'm SURE the Democrap SOLUTION to High Food Prices is MOAR EBT Emergency funding. Like Fake Money could create a single loaf of bread to BUY.
If you think things are expensive NOW, save those receipts for fire starters when you get to burn trash barrels for survival.
As my Drill SGT said "Move it or lose it".
Regarding the abortion issue: Dems (and some others) have been pushing the idea that all those who want to restrict abortion in any way are also in favor of banning contraception, keeping women subservient, and so on. Complete nonsense, but shouted loudly, often, and on widely-seen platforms.
And, regarding Oz the Great and Terrible: has anyone ever accused Trump of making good personnel choices? Yeah, he appointed some good judges, but weren't those mostly picked for him by the Federalist Society?
heresolong -
Hence my statement that the party needs a consistent and unified position. "This is what we want." Instead of, say, Dr Oz refusing to answer the question.
For the past fifty years right-wing rhetoric about abortion has been, fundamentally, directional; people who don't actually want it fully banned were more than happy to say in polls that they want it fully banned, because they were more interested in sending the strongest possible message that they wanted restrictions on abortion than they were in specifying exactly what it was they wanted, fearing that a pollster would treat "Want some restrictions" as "Wants legal abortion" when presenting it to the public, and inflate their preferred policy positions inappropriately. Likewise, many on the left did the same thing - and I think in their cases are still doing the same thing.
Indeed, I think a lot of people never bothered to really think about what they wanted, because they didn't have to; it wasn't going to happen anyways.
And in the meantime people who definitely didn't want abortion banned, but did want more restrictions on it, were happy to elect people who wanted to ban it entirely, because in a political context in which banning it entirely can't happen, the differences between the views of the ban-it-all politicians, and the voter, didn't actually matter to the voter - it wouldn't make a difference to the law.
Well, it suddenly -matters- whether or not a particular politician wants to ban abortion entirely, or put restrictions on it. Suddenly the issue has switched from a binary for/against, to a spectrum.
The Democrats have a lot of candidates who are suddenly sore thumbs in the political landscape with an absolutely stupid "for" position that is supported by less than 20% of the country. The Republicans are, meanwhile, sporting a whole lot of candidates holding an absolutely stupid "against" position that is also supported by less than 20% of the country. The majority of both Democrats and Republicans basically agree about abortion, when you dig into the polls - really the question is where exactly in the range of 15 weeks to 24 weeks the cutoff should be.
(Seriously, the media hasn't just made the Republicans look more extreme than they are here. Democrats, by and large, want the same things. However, everybody's beliefs about everybody else have been shaped by fifty years of rhetoric that is directional, rather than specific)
But here the enthusiasm gap worked against the Republicans - because they were always going to turn out and vote. The Democrats weren't. So the insane <20% Democratic position, while offensive to many people, didn't do too much to motivate anybody on the Republican side, but the insane <20% Republican position motivated a lot of people.
Peter, is it possible that the polls were in fact correct and the number of votes report as being counted were incorrect?
If you ever questioned the statement "we're not voting our way out of this" now is the time to realize the truth expressed. Unfortunately this probably means civil war and the odds on any such event being positive is practically nil.
Some political pundits also have egg on their faces. Many forecast a Republican "red wave" that simply has not emerged. I'd like to know why that happened
As @BadFrog noted, fraud makes a difference. A few months ago, I predicted no "Red Wave" as long as the Dominion vote machines, vote harvesting, ballot stuffing (2000 mules), and mail-in votes still exist, and there was nothing done to fix it. Note that they don't need to do a blatant fraud, just fraud in a few critical districts, and the Deep State wins again.
Also, as @MNW noted, the Uniparty doesn't want a Republican win as that will upset the balance of power in the swamp, and the Uniparty will unite against any outsider.
So I felt a Red Wave was just wishful thinking on the part of people who were (rightfully) upset at the current politicians, and thought it would lead to the politicians getting replaced. "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result", and expecting a corrupt system to replace the current politicians is doomed to failure.
This, the "mainstream" press is loosing viewership/readers, but theybare not broken. They have a lot if sway with demographics that vote and they still have credibly with enough that it is still a problem..
I would say that the GOP establishment is the biggest problem. They have bent the knee for a long time and enriched themselves in the process.
I think much of what got Trump elected is that he fights.
For those who think Festerman being the Senator from Pa is only a problem for Pa may I remind you he has a vote which will affect the entire nation in national matters.
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