But votes can be mislaid, and that’s official, too.
The small town of Kennesaw, Georgia (pop. 33,049) recently held an election for a city council post. The result was certified in favour of one candidate, but it then turned out that a memory stick containing 789 votes had not been successfully (or perhaps not in time) uploaded into the system. This turned the race into a marginal win for the runner-up. The Council re-tested the ballot scanners Saturday and began a recount Sunday. As at the time of writing (Tuesday a.m. UK time) we still don't know the final verdict!
The position had become available because the previous incumbent resigned in protest at the reopening of a local shop selling Civil War memorabilia:
Dent Myers opened Wildman’s in 1971. It became infamous for its display of a Ku Klux Klan robe, racist collectibles, prominently displayed Confederate flag, and storefront signs such as the one that says “White History Year.”Some non-Americans may view that country’s racial difficulties with a kind of eagerness for the apocalypse, as the Left here appeared to hope for South Africa prior to the Presidency of Nelson Mandela.
There’s a twist in human nature that wants to see others suffer in fire and blood - it’s a major, perhaps the main theme of written and cinematic fiction. Not so funny when you have to live through it. America has had enough of violent mountebanks of all kinds.
As it happens, Georgia is also awaiting the outcome of a bigger election, that for its US Senator. The contest on November 8 was so close that neither of the main candidates achieved 50% of the total, so there will be a runoff just between those two on December 6.
Both the incumbent, Raphael Warnock (Democrat) and the challenger Herschel Walker (Republican) are ‘persons of colour.’ Good luck to them both, as the US continues its progress towards harmony at home.
Now for the same, in foreign relations.
Who says that they can't be stolen? The districts in Ohio, North Carolina and several other states are heavily gerrymandered to favour the GOP. In Florida, election officials 'forgot' to send out requested mail-in ballots in heavily Democratic districts. That is also the state which rigged things to prevent ex-felons from getting their franchise back, after voters had passed a ballot measure.
ReplyDelete"In the days after the midterm election, when election returns were still trickling in, I found in the 2008 book by Mark Crispin Miller (et alia), Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, the following passage:
ReplyDelete[…The] evidence of fraud was overwhelming. Americans reported by the tens of thousands that their votes had been tipped electronically; or that their polling places had too few machines and, therefore, lines so long that voting was impossible; or that they’d been told that they couldn’t vote because they hadn’t been registered (although they had registered) or because they had committed felonies (although they had not); or that their polling sites were closed, or had been moved elsewhere; or that the few machines on hand had broken down, or wouldn’t boot up, or, if they used paper, had run out of paper; and so on…
What was interesting was that the volume documenting electoral malfeasance from nearly twenty years ago could have been written about 2022, with the GOP and Democrats swapping roles.
And what puzzles the book’s author/editor Crispin Miller in 2008 is what is puzzling today: why was the aggrieved political party, and why were particular politicians themselves, like John Kerry, so silent, so coy, and even so dissembling about denouncing and investigating brazen crimes that cost them electoral power?
The explanation Crispin Miller entertained at the time was that the proposition that American elections could be stolen, and forced not to reflect the electorate’s will but some other, hidden power, was so monstrous that it could not bear contemplation, particularly not by politicians of a noble or delicate nature, like Kerry. (Insert ironic hilarity emoji here). Crispin Miller revised that and now believes that the Democrats were quiet about election-theft simply because they were biding their time until they themselves could exploit such techniques."
https://therealslog.com/2022/11/22/assassins-of-freedom/
The problem is that no-one can find any evidence of large-scale fraud, including Trump's commission and Barr's investigation.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Briefing_Memo_Debunking_Voter_Fraud_Myth.pdf
Didn't have to be large scale, just focused. The link there makes interesting reading, I suspend judgment but there do seem to be oddities.
ReplyDelete