Did you know that secret ballots are relatively new in the US?

The New Neo Posted on by

I certainly didn’t know it.

But they are; they only date to the last decades of the 1800s:

All elections for most of America’s history were organized to be non-secret. They were public events with individual voting occurring in plain sight of the crowds that election days once attracted. They were the culmination of weeks of excited electioneering. In large cities, they were public spectacles, with torchlight parades and the large scale public “illuminations,” so popular in the Victorian era. In rural places, election days often coincided with markets and sale days. In both contexts, crowds of voters and non-voters, the eligible and the ineligible, young and old, men and (some) women gathered at pubic polling places and watched as the [male] voters, one by one, stepped out from the crowd to vote.

Please read the whole thing; it’s really interesting.

Also, commenter Dave makes a good point (edited very slightly for punctuation, etc.):

Theoretically, anonymous voting prevents bribery by denying ways for bribee to provide proof to briber that he has voted in the way requested. Mail in ballots pretty much completely destroyed that mechanism of bribery prevention. Bribee can fill out the ballot in front of the briber now. With mail in ballots confidential voting has absolutely no benefit besides making voter fraud very easy to do.

Progress!

The war on Trump: almost a third of Democrats think the election was probably stolen from Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow.

Maybe that near-third of Democrats represents the number who actually voted for Trump in 2016. Then again, perhaps not; the poll doesn’t seem to have asked whether respondents approve of the theft. My guess is that, had that question been asked, some of the Democrats would have said “yes.”

A lot of people who think Trump was probably robbed apparently also think he should concede. Perhaps some are reasoning a la the Nixon legend of 1960 regarding Chicago cheating and how he supposedly ignored it “for the good of the country.”

Let’s take a closer look at the poll results:

Forty-seven percent (47%) say it’s likely that Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Biden would win, but 50% disagree. …

Even among those who Strongly Approve of Trump’s job performance, nearly one-in-four (23%) believe he should admit he lost…

Fifteen percent (15%) of those who want Trump to concede agree [that Democrats cheated].

The survey was taken November 17-18. Of course, now that most of us don’t trust polls at all, it’s hard to know what to make of it. But I think it’s probably at least an approximation of sentiment. It was taken before yesterday’s Giuliani/Powell/Ellis press conference, which might or might not have moved the needle.

Whoever ends up being president, about half the population will believe that president is illegitimate. This is a bad situation for the nation, but it’s not a new situation. It began with 2000, and then there was a hiatus till 2016. Four years ago, however, the main problem wasn’t alleged by the Democrats to have been vote-counting. They blew up a small and ordinary amount of internet propaganda from Russia into an absurd-from-the-start full-blown fiction that Trump was some sort of Russian agent or was at least compromised by Russia. The Democrats and the MSM devoted the next four years to variations on that theme, and that has undermined not only Trump but the republic itself.

Now, of course, they are still busy at the game of accusing Trump of horrendous offenses. Witness, for example, this NY Times article that Pocket (a service of Mozilla) felt I really really needed to see today: “Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in U.S. History.” Would that the Times had shown that level of outrage for the four years it cheered on and facilitated the truly unprecedented attempt by the Democrats to discredit and remove Trump from office by using various agencies of government to spy on and defame him.

Trying to get the courts to investigate whether fraud occurred in an election is in fact warranted, particularly this year with the rule-changes – always in the direction of more relaxation and less security – the stopping of vote-counting in various swing states at more or less the same time, and then the flood of Democratic votes pouring in, not to mention all the affidavits attesting to vote-counting irregularities. It is a very odd argument to make that this all should be ignored. The Times would most certainly be singing another tune if the shoe were on the other party’s foot.

I see that Mollie Hemingway has quite a bit to say on the subject:

What Democrats and their media enablers put Trump and his Republican voters through these last four years was truly horrific. The media sold the Russia collusion story as a certainty for years. When it unraveled, they either denied that it had unraveled, or ignored it and moved to the next effort to oust Trump.

The false and delusional conspiracy theory, wielded eagerly and viciously by media handmaidens in order to harm Trump and his voters and keep them from accomplishing their policy objectives, damaged the country. While there is no evidence in support of the claim of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election, and in fact not a single American was found to have colluded, it was pushed so relentlessly by liberals that 81 percent of liberals actually believe it was true! Tribe is right that conspiracy theories are harmful to the fabric of the country. He and every single other person who perpetrated the Russia collusion hoax should never forget how much they harmed the country with their lies.

Trump’s 74 million supporters — knowing that their political opponents are willing to spy, fund and fabricate a dossier, push a “collusion” hoax, accuse a federal judge of being a serial gang rapist, run a “resistance” campaign throughout the federal government, manufacture an impeachment, use tech corporations to censor legitimate news about Biden family corruption, trash an economy, and lie about Trump’s standing with American voters through propaganda polls — now have a pretty good idea that election fraud is well within the realm of possibility. That would be true even if Democrats hadn’t spent much of the year working to ensure lowered scrutiny of mail-in ballots, which everyone knows are more susceptible to fraud than other ballots.

If it takes a few weeks for these 74 million voters and their elected representatives to see if they can learn anything about election integrity and whether this election had it, the people who put them through four years of claims about “illegitimacy” can go ahead and sit down and wait.

Yes, they can. But they won’t. They will never stop.

Before this election, I felt more fear than I ever have before around an election. One of many reasons was that I was afraid of fraud, but still another reason was that even if Trump was elected I felt that the attacks would ramp up. Riots, lawfare, allegations of fraud, new impeachments (because I felt pretty sure the House would still be controlled by Democrats), new leaks of calls with foreign leaders, new allegations of Russian collusion or whatever the meme du jour from the left might be. The left would stop at nothing to stop Trump.

How the press will treat Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

You know the drill.

Sample question for Biden: has Trump stopped beating his wife?

Trump continues to suck all the air out of the room. A description:

Exhibit A was on display Monday afternoon during a rare press conference with the president-elect that included questions that can’t even be called softball, but more like T-ball when putting a beach ball on the tee.

The most disturbing part was what has become a theme at Biden pressers, which is to have a staffer choose which reporters ask questions, as opposed to Biden randomly calling on them instead…

Any press conference Biden has held since capturing the Democratic nomination has consisted mostly of questions about President Trump and very few questions about Biden’s own worldview, record, policy stances or perspective on important issues…

Of the 12 questions Biden received Monday, there were zero follow-ups. Zero interruptions during answers. Zero questions about any of the issues above, which rank as among the top concerns on voters’ minds, along with the coronavirus.

…Instead, we got exchanges like this:

Reporter 1, Question 1: “Good to see you … You spoke about the need to access the outgoing administration’s COVID vaccine distribution plans. What do you see as the biggest threat to your transition right now, given President Trump’s unprecedented attempt to obstruct and delay a smooth transfer of power?”

Reporter 2, Question 1: “Thank you, Mr. President-elect. You just spoke of some of the dangers of the president’s continued stonewalling of this transition. But it doesn’t appear that the president is going to come around anytime soon and admit defeat. So, what are you going to do? What options do you have to try and ensure that you are ready to go on Day One?”

Reporter 2, Question 2: “What is your message to Republicans who are backing up the president’s refusal to concede? You clearly need to work with them going forward.”

Reporter 3, Question 1: “Thank you very much, Mr. President-elect. I want to kind of piggyback off of that. I want to get your thoughts on the president’s tweet over the weekend, where he first seemed to acknowledge that you won, then he said he won’t concede, then he said, ‘I won.’ How did you interpret that? And at the end of the day, do you want him to concede?”

Two other points made in the article. The first is that Kamala Harris was onstage at the presser but no one asked her a single question. Will any Democrat feminist complain, or is that role for her completely fine with them? The second is that at Trump’s first presser after being elected, the press pounded him with questions about Russian interference “with the implication being that Trump could not have possibly won on his own without major help from an outside entity to impact the result under the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ line of questioning.”

I wonder whether people in the political middle – whoever they are – have noticed the disparity, and what they might think about it.

We’ve made so much progress between 2008 and 2020, haven’t we?

The New Neo Posted on by

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he felt he had to distance himself from Reverend Wright once some of the hateful content of Wright’s sermons came out. Obama knew the press would defend whatever Obama said on the subject and call it a powerful and wonderful speech – including, by the way, his dissing as a racist “typical white person” the grandmother who had raised him – and so Obama was pretty confident that he could get out from under suspicion regarding his closeness with Reverend Wright.

But at least he knew he needed to do something, or voters would reject him.

This time a Reverend Wright near-equivalent, Raphael Warnock (see this as well as this), is looking to become the next senator from Georgia and help flip the Senate to the left, and the entire Democratic Party is not only supporting him but is doing so in ways that seem quite extreme.

Such as, for example, NY Times writer Thomas Friedman telling Democrats to move to Georgia to vote in the runoff and elect Warnock and the other Democrat contender, Osoff. Moving for that purpose – merely to vote in a runoff after the general election has already occurred – is considered a felony by Georgia. But hey, it’s worth it, right? Friedman doesn’t seem the least bit hesitant to advocate this on national TV, because he knows such statements will not draw rebuke from the party or the Times:

An engineer tells us why we must end software-based voting

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin.]

To tell you the truth, although I knew software was involved in voting in some states, until this election I had no idea how widespread its use had become.

Please read. Some excerpts:

Let me list just some of the ways one could engage in election cheating by fiddling with software:

— Change the voting ratio between two candidates by any fraction
— Display an entered vote correctly to the voter, then change the vote before tabulation
— Display a summary of votes to an election official, and change that total later
— Allow remote modification of vote totals via the internet or local WiFi
— Change votes or methods at a certain time of day, or at a later date, even after voting machine certification concludes, or before/during auditing
— Change votes in a random fashion on election day to make it appear to be a legitimate voting trend
— Change voting trends by precinct, or using historical voting statistics
— Update the software secretly with a new algorithm
— Provide intermediate vote tallies to remote actors who are gaming the election in other ways
— Make adjustments to the votes of one candidate and tracking adjustments to other candidates down ballot

…Behind every dishonest voting machine is a pile of dishonest programmers who have no moral inhibitions against giving local and regional politicians the tools they need to steal elections. And these highly intelligent idiots don’t consider for a minute that those same tools could be used by the government against their side when they fall out of favor. Software geeks are pretty smart in many ways and quite stupid in many others. I don’t trust them with my future or my government. Should you?

A reader will retort that the voting machines should use open source code, so the good geeks can examine what’s happening behind the curtain. That won’t prevent bad geeks from modifying voting machine code on the day of the election, or even after, to change vote totals. Not every problem has a competent and honest solution in software.

Common sense tells us that the best voting system uses a mechanical method to mark a ballot in a clear way (such as pen and paper). This method allows the ballots to be securely archived in case of disputes. While hand-counting and protecting ballots can be labor-intensive, it’s possible to have high confidence in the outcome. With software-based voting systems, your vote is at the mercy of some group of geeks, perhaps in another country, who have no respect for your life or your vote.

Makes sense to me. But as I’ve written before, no changes will be made – except in red states – unless both parties are behind such changes, and I see no reason whatsoever that the Democrats would support that. They are not afraid of Republican fraud.

Another day, another fraud roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

It takes a long time to even read the fraud allegation news of the day, and for the most part I’m not inclined to pick the information apart in blog post after blog post after blog post. Every now and then if there’s something especially interesting, I’ll write about it in a lot more detail. At the moment, though, I hear amazing allegations and we just don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. So I’ll just put some of it here for your perusal and you can judge for yourself.

I will add that, for the most part, with election fraud an ounce of prevention is worth a million tons of cure. Fraud can be prevented if the will is there and more rigorous rules for voting are in place. But it takes two parties to want it, and that is definitely not the case in the US today and especially not this year. Once that prevention horse is out of the barn, proving that fraud actually occurred and finding a remedy for what happened is nearly impossible. Fraudsters know that. The motivation to commit fraud is sky-high, and if there’s an opportunity they will try to do it and may indeed succeed. Even if fraud hasn’t happened, vulnerability of the system will encourage the strong suspicion on the part of a great deal of the public that fraud has occurred, which is a very bad thing as well.

The answer is to offer little or no opportunity for fraud. Much much too late for that.

It’s not too late for the two Georgia runoff contests, though. So, what are the Republican elected officials there doing to prevent fraud in that coming election? So far, I don’t hear much. If anyone here has your finger on the pulse of the Georgia GOP, please comment about what you see and what you think is going on.

Without further ado, the roundup:

(1) Echoes of Smartmatic and Venezuela.

(2) The Georgia counting is a mess. But you probably already knew that. See also this as well as this.

(3) Twitter and Facebook are surpressing discussion of voter fraud. No surprise there.

(4) Nevada’s cash-for-votes.

(5) The race card and doxxing of children is boldly played by a Democratic Michigan State Representative against a Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers who had refused to certify the election because of ballot number discrepancies. Shortly after, both Republicans on the board voted to certify. Such a surprise.

(6) A Wisconsin recount is proceeding in two counties at the Trump campaign’s expense.

(7) Election fraud vulnerabilities: then and now.

(8) Fake registration charges in California.

(9) Show us the Kraken if you’ve got it.

(10) We’re in big trouble. A good summary of the fraud situation.

COVID and fear: just wondering…

The New Neo Posted on by

…now that they have successfully taken away so many liberties because of COVID-fear, what would be the plan if a more lethal pandemic came down the pike? It’s a rhetorical question, because we all know the answer: take away even more.

COVID is a nasty illness, and people die. But as bad as it is, it doesn’t even begin to compare to the illnesses of yesteryear. I’ve written about that many times before, so I won’t go into it again here except to quote one of the first things I ever wrote about COVID:

It’s a wonderful thing that the incidence of most of those diseases has been remarkably reduced. Wonderful, fabulous, a great reduction in human suffering. But there’s been a cost, too, and it’s the increasing fragility of our psyches’ ability to withstand and endure even the prospect of an increase in disease and mortality that mirrors what my generation experienced…

There were so many illnesses around all the time that there was no way to escape. You might say we were fatalistic, you might say we were resigned, you might say we were stupid, you might say we assumed the risk, or you might say we understood that the drawbacks of that sort of reaction were immense as well.

Of course, I wasn’t around in 1918. I wasn’t around when smallpox and tuberculosis or the Black Death killed far far more of the people on earth than any of the plagues of my lifetime have come close to killing. I cannot even imagine how terrible those things were; I don’t even want to imagine. And I doubt that people took them in stride at all. And I think a good part of the dread and fear now is that in the back of our minds – or for some people, even the front of our minds – we know that such catastrophes are still possible. Human beings know they are intensely vulnerable.

But COVID-19 is not shaping up to be that sort of event, and there’s no reason to think it will be. However, although many measures are prudent – handwashing, increased testing, hospital preparedness, some measure of social distancing at least for a while – the degree of fear I see and hear is far greater than anything I can recall in my lifetime around a medical event.

That fear has been encouraged. What’s the endgame? As commenter Brian Lovely writes:

Covid is never going away — vaccine or no, it will always be out there, because you can’t vaccinate everyone with 100% success and 100% permanency. So the at-risk types (like my ex) can claim “OMG you’re trying to kill us” forever. So when do we get to stop and get our lives back?

It’s feeling like the answer is “never”, barring a revolution.

Actually, I’m not sure that COVID isn’t ever going away. If you vaccinate enough people with enough efficacy, you make such a large percentage of the population immune that the disease effectively (if not completely) disappears. But the point is the same, because it doesn’t have to be COVID that drives the assault on liberty. It can be any disease that we’re unaccustomed to – and certainly, other new diseases will arise.

Or it can even be something other than a disease. The m.o. is the same: control through fear.

The war on art: Of Mice and Men

The New Neo Posted on by

The school system in Burbank, California has added the following five books to its “banned in Burbank” list:

Until further notice, teachers in the area will not be able to include on their curriculum Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

The reasons given seem to boil down to the allegation that they made a few students feel bad, and a student teased another student with a racial epithet and said he learned it from one of the books. Ah, so ban it rather than discuss it or deal with the problem – which is not the book. One might just as well ban Catcher in the Rye because of its role in motivating John Lennon’s assassin.

I know that poor old Atticus Finch and poor young Huck Finn have been on the chopping block for a long long time. I’m unfamiliar with two of the other books. But Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men I know, and I believe it is a masterpiece, and I was unaware till now of the fact that the censors have been after Of Mice and Men for a long time, too. And from that list of objections at the link I just gave – “‘promoting euthanasia’, ‘condoning racial slurs’, being ‘anti-business’, containing profanity, and generally containing ‘vulgar’ and ‘offensive language'” – it may even be that originally (the book was published in 1937) it was the right that had problems with it, although nowadays it seems that the left is leading the crusade.

I read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men when I was very young, maybe eleven or twelve years of age. Whether or not it was a school assignment I can’t remember, but I do recall my reaction to it. It moved and devastated me. It’s very short, really more a novella than a novel, and I believe I read it in one fell swoop. To this day, the phrase “live off the fat of the land” can bring tears to my eyes.

I haven’t read the book in more than fifty years, but it’s one of those books that stay with you, although all the details don’t. Especially for a young teenager, it was a great work of art: easy to read, with vivid characters that I immediately cared about, describing a world that was altogether foreign to me and yet seemed real and comprehensible, full of pathos and cruelty and compassion and longing and ultimately tragedy.

I don’t know how I’d react to it now, and I don’t know how the kids of today would see it, if they’re allowed to see it. But I do know that banning it diminishes us. And I submit that what replaces it will be nowhere near as great, if indeed it is great at all.

[NOTE: I’ll add that I’ve seen a dramatic adaptation or two, and they don’t work for me. It’s the book that does it.]

The press relies on ignorance of history

The New Neo Posted on by

Its own, and that of its audience. If your audience doesn’t know history you can get away with saying anything.

People know that the word “Nazi” denotes something bad, but what percentage of the population today has any deeper knowledge of what Nazis stood for, advocated, and actually did, as well as their plans for the future had they not been defeated? I would guess that knowledge is very shallow, particularly among those under fifty years of age (see this, for example).

So one can call President Bush Hitler, President Trump Hitler, demonstrators for Trump Nazis and Fascists, and the audience will nod sagely and take it all in. CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour shamelessly gets into the act. Hey, all’s fair in love and war, right? And this is war.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that she doesn’t even know what happened during Kristallnacht – or what’s happening now, for that matter:

Tucker Carlson: not that long ago, suspicion of voting machine software was bipartisan

The New Neo Posted on by

I think Tucker has it right. Despite some bipartisan jaw-jawing about the problem, nothing was done.

Please watch this segment:

Here’s an article with some of the history.

And yet – as Carlson points out – journalists say that reports of any problems are false, have been debunked, etc. But we don’t yet know the specifics of most of the allegations and there’s been no time to actually know whether they’re true or false. They will have their day in court, but I doubt whether the matter will be convincingly put to rest, and because of the time element the proceedings will be very rushed.