Tim Patrick
I don’t know if you’ve been reading the news lately, but one of the presidential candidates this time around thinks the election wasn’t on the up and up. “Voter fraud” is on everyone’s lips, whether they’re insisting it happened or sure that it didn’t.
Certainly, there is a small amount of voter fraud in every election. Some of it seems oh so innocent. Consider the case where your elderly mother wins the big prize in the church raffle: an all-expense-paid trip to the National Historic Cheesemaking Center Museum in Monroe, Wisconsin. “Ridiculous,” you say? “The museum is currently closed,” you say? But your mother Mildred didn’t know that when she boarded the Greyhound bus for America’s Dairyland. And wouldn’t you know it, she left her filled-out but unsigned ballot on the kitchen table, just three days before the election.
It’s clear that she meant to vote. She already marked her choices. Should you forge her signature and submit the ballot? Would it be wrong? Is this election too important to leave in the hands of cheese mongers? You might take the moral high ground, but there are many in this nation who would have no qualms about committing mail fraud and perjury to ensure their mother’s vote counted.
The issue is not about whether voter fraud happens from time to time; it does. The question is if there was widespread, premeditated, intentional fraud this time around, to the extent that the election was stolen. Although I lean right-of-center politically, I expect that this election—like the one four years earlier—was above-board, honest, and carried out with thoroughness and accuracy. My reasons for believing this way are, first and foremost, my gut.
Despite what I read online, I cannot bring myself to believe that a sizeable portion of the electorate is ready to engage in brazenly immoral and illegal actions just to further some political view. There may be some ranking members of Congress who would do that, but not the citizenry at large.
The problem with this opinion is that it isn’t based on any evidence whatsoever. I’m sure that I’m right; I know that I’m right. But it is not because I contacted various secretaries of state and asked to review voting logs. I didn’t even look stuff up on Wikipedia. I just had faith in the system.
In part, this faith stems from what America was and is and was founded on. We aren’t a dictatorship, where the ruling party has absolute control over all ballots, and is glad to use fear and even torture to “win” an election. We also aren’t a nation known for bribery and graft in government. Americans don’t need to prepare unmarked envelopes stuffed with cash just to get some electrical work inspected and approved in their homes, as happens in some countries. We expect that, for the most part, we will experience integrity, or at least the attempt at it, in the majority of our daily encounters. The same goes for counting votes.
Still, it’s possible that my laissez faire attitude concerning the election is part of the problem. I know there are people screaming about election fraud in 2020 who have no plans to actually locate or document the fraud beyond what they heard on some talk show. There may in fact be such proof, but the angry hoards aren’t starting with evidence. They’ve decided to be up in arms about voter fraud just in case.
If I’m honest with myself—and that’s one of the goals of Cognizeit—I’m going into this discussion equally unprepared to give evidence for my views. That makes it extremely difficult to rebuff the accusations of my fellow Republicans. But it’s right in line with so much that goes by the name of “voting” in America. The ballot box has become a great place to do things by our gut rather than by real research on policies or an understanding of what the role of a political leader was meant to be. That trust-the-politicians, trust-the system approach to elections is, perhaps, the biggest fraud of them all.
[Image Credits: tnehala/photo-ac.com]
As a resident of Washington State close elections are historic but for some reason they always result in the Democrat being elected. Gorton vs. Cantwell in 2000 lost by 276 and Rossi vs Gregoire in 2004 lost by 130 on the third recount after leading after the first two recounts when the left leaning state supreme court ruled that 732 absentee ballots discovered during Democratic sponsored recount could be corrected and counted but rejected Republican requests to correct and count 250 similar ballots.
My daughter, an attorney, served as a poll watcher in a national election in the ’90’s and observed suspicious behavior in the precincts she was asked to work. She observed provisional ballots being accepted and counted without verifying the persons voter registration allowing that person to also visit other precincts and vote. Since poll officials kept my daughter at a distance she was unable to contest the action taken.
Yes, I am suspicious of voter irregularities in the swing states. Of course I am normally suspicious but there are just too many statistical anomalies that the press want to quickly sweep under the rug. The appearance of a coordinated shut down of counting in swing states that at the time showed Trump leading only have that quickly change after the counting resumed, numerous instances of poll watchers kept away from signature verification, Nevada using a 40% acceptance scale on their automated signature verification machine, ballots reported counted in major swing cities that only had votes for Biden, cities where mail ballots were usually in the 200K range with a signature error rate of 3% and in 202 3M mail in ballots with a .3% error rate, Pennsylvania not matching mail-in voters signature with voter registration signatures are just a few of the many “recorded” instances of voting irregularities in this years presidential election.
Today’s businesses subject to federal rules and regulations would not be allowed to operate this way and yet much of the media want it all of it swept away and dismiss Trump’s call for recounts but supported Gore through all of his appeals and recounts.
I await the conclusion of all of the appeals to make a final judgment but for a country that stands above others in so many ways this does not pass the smell test.