VOTER FRAUD IS A FRAUD AND A WOODCHUCK CAN CHUCK WOOD
Ted Cruz is right. Voter fraud is a problem. So is mis-shelving the Doritos with the canned soup.
In Ted’s case, it’s like an arsonist complaining about smoke inhalation. In Josh Hawley’s case it’s an infinite regress. I, Senator Hawley, proclaim that there has been widespread voter fraud. Television audience: voter fraud that’s awful. Senator Hawley: we have to respond to the public’s concern over voter fraud.
A lot of the action on voting rights in taking place in the 50 states, many of which have changed laws to restrict forms of voting commonly used in 2020 by constituencies not among the Republican minority coalition. Election integrity has found traction in statehouses like authoritarianism in a petri dish.
Observation: The same legislature that slices and dices Congressional Districts in the interests of its party, is not simultaneously likely to be scrupulously fair in how those elections are conducted. The motive does not change from the first action to the second.
Observation: If the 2020 election was stolen the caper went down like this: burglars broke into the art gallery and stole the most valuable painting. But, while doing so they installed numerous other worthy, but less valuable paintings, at the same time. Down ballot Republicans did better than expected, so did Trump. Trump got more votes in 2020 than in 2016. Biden got more votes as has the Democrat’s candidate in 7 of the 8 last Presidential elections.
Trump’s own polling showed him losing which is why he hawked Plan B. It’s likely Trump’s claims of fraud discouraged enough Republican voters to deliver both Georgia Senate Seats to the Democrats.
The certainty the caper took place is inversely proportionate to details on how it was done, or even possible. Because it wasn’t. There simply is not enough bamboo fiber to use a Venezuelan voting fraud system on an Italian Server to dump several hundred thousand votes into Lake Michigan. The claims are not just unlikely, they are demented.
Which of the noble Republican guardians of election integrity has come forward to say: Yes, I won election in 2020, but, because of the degree in voter fraud, I realize my constituents have good reason to doubt the legitimacy of the outcome. Therefore, I am resigning and asking that a Special Election be called to rerun the election for my seat. That would be none.
There is a very old saying that preaches the outcome delivers the judgment about the process. Indeed, fiddling with and gaming the process or the system is a common, legalistic tactic to elevate form over substance when the substance is not to your liking.
More and more people shop online or fill out applications for jobs or government prop grams online. Commerce depends, ever more intensely, on the Post Office or private carriers to deliver goods. The direction of commerce is in the direction of a greater technical apparatus. Amazon, for example, has gorged itself in an environment where remote transactions are accurately received and acknowledged, payment processed, and goods dispatched.
Over the past several years, Amazon has not decided to back away from remote sales or apply less of the convenience of technology to its operations. In fact, it keeps sophisticating that process. Amazon is not only competent, but they understand the process is about the customer and not the purchase.
Voting is about the voter and not the vote. Retrenching, obscuring and undoing the kind of technologically enhanced process seen in every other sector, needs extraordinary justification to claim an exception. The extraordinary justification is that the Republican minority party has to institutionalize a combination of actions against representative democracy and majoritarian values, to set out a legal fiction by which it can call itself legitimate.
The deed cannot be stopped. It is done. It can only be undone. People who whine about Big Government don’t really give a hoot about the budget, the deficit, or the debt or even job killing regulations. What they don’t like is that, since the New Deal, the Federal Government has been the prime mover in expanding the franchise, the rights of minorities and women and the provision of services essential for life to more and more individuals.
That’s what has to end and if free and fair elections are the price, not a problem.
