The Democrats’ mantra is “count every vote,” and the Republicans say “count every legal vote.” That’s part of the difference between the two parties, isn’t it? The first with a “win at all costs” mentality, the second more concerned with process because it knows the entire country loses if process is tainted:
by “every vote counts,” the Left means each vote must be tallied regardless of whether the voter is lawfully qualified to vote, and regardless of whether the vote was cast within the properly enacted rules of the election. This is why Democrats fight tooth-and-nail against every proposal to require voter identification, to match signatures, to outlaw vote “harvesting,” etc. Just as the Left takes umbrage at the term “illegal alien” on the nonsensical ground that “no person is illegal” (as if there were not patent differences between legal immigration status and human dignity), they would have you accept, on a “social justice” rationale, that there can be no illegal votes in a “true democracy.”
To be sure, this is a political pose.
And I might add, a very productive one.
So, process is tainted, and I don’t just mean the voting process although I certainly do mean that and I want to stress that it’s central because voting is the people’s major non-violent means of redress and correction for all the other problems. The process has been tainted for quite some time in many ways, but as time goes on it becomes more and more clear. For me, the fist powerful and unequivocal realization of that came a while back, when the IRS discriminated against the right and nothing was ever done about it. Your turning point may have been earlier or it may have been later, or it may not have happened yet although I tend to doubt the latter.
There were many other incidents that occurred earlier and some later. Some of them may have seemed extremely minor to other people (like this early move of Obama’s and rank-and-file Democrats shrugging in response) and some were major, like the promises about the Durham investigation that did not materialize prior to the 2020 election.
The biggest problem is that the left’s attitude towards power is to gain it at any cost and keep it at any cost. And right now they have a lot of power, and their power spreads across most of the institutions of our society. But right now, for whatever reason, it does not include the state legislatures, which remain majority Republican in the majority of states, and that’s especially important in this year of reapportionment. If there’s any silver lining to the huge storm clouds I see right now, it’s that. But what to do with it, in the face of all the forces arrayed against the right?
Pennsylvania was a good example of how it worked. It has a Republican-controlled legislature that passed laws setting the rules in this year’s elections, with the seeming cooperation of the Democrats. And then the Democrats took it to the Democrat-controlled Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and won further extensions. In effect, the Pennsylvania court legislated from the bench and overruled the Republican legislature, and then SCOTUS punted 4-4, which allowed that ruling to stand for now.
“For now” included this election, of course, and once the deed is done it’s very difficult to call it back. The Court would be loathe to overturn what is perceived as the result of the 2020 election, a Biden win, and declare Trump winner when Biden has been labeled the winner by the entire media and at least half of the American public. That’s my prediction, anyway.
In addition, it’s hardly just Pennsylvania. One of the things the Democrats have going for them is their control of deep-blue large cities in swing states, and that’s the key to perpetuating fraud. If they’re willing to do it in most or all of the swing states, then it is exceptionally hard to counter because it will produce an overwhelming effect – and because once the votes are counted, how does one prove anything to the degree that the Court would require?
Correct me if I’m wrong – I’m no expert on election law, and I haven’t been able to locate a definitive source that can answer my questions – but once Republican poll watchers are sent away and the vote-counting is done in secret, and once a bunch of bogus votes are counted and/or bona fide ones tossed, how can it be proven? The envelopes with the postmarks and names are gone, aren’t they? And even if saved, they’re no longer matched with the votes they contained, right? And in particular in states where mass unsolicited mailings had occurred, I doubt for the most part that votes cast exceeded ballots mailed, so the total vote counts would be unlikely to prove fraud on a scale that exceeds Biden’s margin of victory in that state, right? Even whistleblowers – and what Democrat partisan is a whistleblower – are unlikely to be able to report fraud on the scale that would justify overturning an election. If the votes are counted in secret, it seems to me that it’s game over even if some sort of suspicious activity is proven in court, because it’s a case of “What’s the remedy?”.
I could go on in that vein, but you get the idea. As I said before, I don’t like being a downer, so I actually invite correction and more upbeat points of view in the comments.
In closing, here’s a roundup of very relevant articles:
This from the NY Post, a paper that has emerged as a champion lately.
This and this as well as this and this. From the latter:
Now we are asked to simply trust corrupt Democratic political machines in one-party cities to count the vote honestly. We will not. Instead, Republicans must aggressively investigate and prosecute any and all wrongdoing in the attempt to steal this election.,,
If Republicans let this happen without pushing to ensure all applicable laws were and are now being followed they can forget about winning contested states and therefore national elections. The new rule, the new “norm” for the Democrats, will forever be what they did last night: “If an election is close we stop all the counting for a while until we can figure out what’s going on.” But Republicans do not have to let it happen.
So don’t get me wrong – when I express pessimism I’m not saying we should give up.
Back in early September of this year, I wrote the following:
We are in a heap of trouble. The voting laws have been expanding in recent decades in a way that I believe erodes the voting process as well as trust in the voting process. Absentee ballots have extra safeguards built in, and I’m okay with them in limited circumstances. But early voting and mail-in voting and vote harvesting, as well as laws banning the requirement of IDs, are a travesty and increase fraud. Once people no longer trust the vote-tallying process – and I submit that we have reached that point – we’re in banana-republic-land.
This was allowed to happen in this country despite the fact that it didn’t have to happen. No other Western country has voting processes anything like ours, but ours are no accident.