And they went out of their way to make sure as many wanna-be voters would get tripped up by this as possible (perhaps on the knee-jerk assumption that this would catch more Dem voters?) From the same article:
I already VBM’ed for a primary next month, and I’m going to do the Absentee Board (i.e. count ballots) again. Looking forward to it!
I’m pretty sure the rebuttal to that would be, “Democrats would have won big through cheating if it weren’t for the valiant efforts of us Trump patriots who fought tooth and nail to preserve election integrity. We couldn’t save Trump, but we mitigated the damage as much as we could. Without us the Ds would have won even bigger.”
No, they have a better answer than that (at least in their minds). You see, the cheating only needed to occur in a few counties in 4 or 5 states. These were already in Democratic districts, so cheating in these counties wouldn’t affect any house races. The only Senate races in these states that were up were those in Georgia (which did go Democratic). So, in their minds, Ann’s argument only supports their theory.
Of course, the trick is to know which counties you need to cheat in and how much you need to cheat in order to win. That is, it’s easy to pick Rich Strike to win the Kentucky Derby on May 8, 2022 (the day after the race). It’s tough to know who to pick before-hand. And, the only places they cheated were states that Biden won. Finally, if there really was widespread cheating, why did the Trumpists spend so much time on bullshit accusations, lawsuits, and audits (all of which revealed no cheating)?
No, it really doesn’t matter since the truth means nothing. One sentiment repeated by these guys is “I don’t care what anyone says, I’ll never believe that the Democrats didn’t cheat.” That right there says that they aren’t interested in the truth, their minds are made up.
Actually, it wasn’t always supported equally by both parties. Initially (this was back in the mid-90s, before it became the law), the Democrats were mostly against because they figured it would help the Republicans more. Then they had a bye election for Senator (filling Bob Packwood’s seat after he resigned, IIRC) where the SoS said they didn’t have enough money for a regular election, so they did an all VbM. The Democrat won. Suddenly, the Democrats were all in favor of it.
Thanks for fighting my ignorance. Everything I’d read on its history made it sound like everyone was onboard from the beginning.
To me, it’s the most sane way to conduct elections – irrespective of party preferences.
Agree 100%. Now they just have to change the FPTP voting. I like Alaska’s new system. A jungle primary with the top four in a Ranked Choice general election.
The thing that scares me about ranked choice voting is what happened in California in… what, 2018, I think…? They had so many Democrats running for a seat in a red district and so few Republicans, it could easily have been the case that only the Republicans took the top spots.
Democrats saw the flaw and made sure they got a Democrat on the ballot – and they actually won in the general! But I remember nail-chewing in the primary.
Ah, here’s a story about it:
I’m not familiar with Alaska’s new system, but I’ll do some studying.
California doesn’t have Ranked Choice voting. They have a jungle primary with the top two getting into a FPTP general election.
The jungle primary system is a clusterfuck, IMNSHO. It’s possible, and I believe it has happened in CA that two Republicans won some race, shutting out any Democrat candidate from the general election, and in other case(s) that two Democrats won, shutting out any Republican candidate.
If a primary election has a whole bunch of Repub candidates and only a few Dem candidates, then the Repub voters may split their votes among all the Repub candidates, thus handing the general election to two of the Dem candidates. And conversely if there are a whole bunch of Dem candidates and only a few Repub candidates. The whole scheme was never well thought out.
Or else it was intended all along as party-control insurance to dissuade the challenging of incumbents or at least ensure the seat stays with the party. Not a fan of it either.
Wait. What? If the MAGA view is sophisticated enough to build this scenario, wouldn’t it occur to them that if those counties are already Democratic, Biden would win in those counties anyway, and there’d be no need to cheat?
That was almost too painful to watch. It left me actually feeling nauseated.
Makes me wonder if there is another disease out there That prevents people from thinking. Or having any, ANY critical analysis skills whatsoever.
It should because this is exactly how fascism takes root. The parallels to the rose of Nazism in Weimar-era Germany (which was just one of many proto-fascist and nativist movements) are striking. There was even an Elon Musk-like popular industrialist (Frederich Flick) who used his influence to both bring far-right candidates (including, eventually, Hitler and the NSDAP) to power while using his political influence to consolidate his control over many industries. Of course, all the people in the video lavishing upon Trump regardless of what he says and the disconnect of their statements (the two heavily-made up women: “Cult is such a negative word…I feel like whatever [Trump] spews out of his mouth, I love it!”) is the classical ‘cult of personality’ that is an essential element of fascism. The callow obeisance and risible obliviousness of these people is amusing at the individual level but when you string a bunch of them together and realize that they probably aren’t even the most radical of people at this event; just the ones that were most comedic, it is a chilling reminder of how narrow the boundary between ‘amusingly idiotic’ and ‘dangerously misinformed’ is in a democracy.
Stranger
No, you’re not seeing it. The five swing states that Biden won:
State Margin
AZ 10,457
GA 11,779
MI 154,118
PA 80,555
WI 17,411
The narrative is that all of these margin votes could be fraudulent votes cast in heavily Democratic districts. In the Senate and Presidential races, it does not matter which district the vote was cast at it is only the statewide total that counts. The point Ann was making (I believe) was that if the Dems were cheating, why did they only take the Presidential race and not win more House and Senate seats. The MAGA story is that the cheating only occurred in Blue districts, which did elect House seats and produced enough votes to push the state to Biden for President. Only two of these states had Senate elections (GA and special elections in GA and AZ), which also went to Democrats.
My point is, while this appears to a valid point, it only works if it was known how close the races would be. The polls were all over the place, but most had Biden winning anyway. How did the Dastardly Dems (Band Name!) know how many fraudulent votes to manufacture? And, it was only in these 5 states that any cheating occurred. North Carolina (which also was a close state, but went to Trump) wasn’t an issue.
No, there isn’t any evidence to indicate a fraudulent election, but the argument of “if they cheated, why didn’t they win more House an Senate seats?” has a plausible answer. A much better argument is “if they cheated, why didn’t they get caught?”
Just a niggle …
There’s quite a bit of evidence of election fraud and attempted election fraud.
It just happens to have been perpetrated by the Republicans.
[Ignoring for the moment how the Republicans are using their projection-allegations to systematically rig the next elections ("It’s not who votes; it’s who counts the votes.)]
Oh, no doubt. And, it would be extremely unusual if only Republicans engaged in fraudulent behaviors. Both intentional fraud and inadvertent fraud. However, most of that is small-time stuff and would not affect the outcome (although it would be interesting to perform a full-blown audit of all registered voters who cast ballots in some of the sparsely-populated districts, perhaps just to see how many people had registered their dogs, etc…
To me, the strongest indicator that nothing was significantly amiss is the fact that nobody has produced any real evidence. All of the evidence that has been brought up is just bullshit, like there were more votes cast than were registered voters (which cannot happen as every vote counted has to come from an issued ballot and ballots are only issued to registered voters), or that the Dominion tabulators were switching votes (which hand-counting of the ballots has proven not to be the case). In addition, none of the state’s Election Boards have indicated anything amiss (do you really think that Brian Kemp would keep his mouth shut if he could even cast reasonable doubt?).
No, our election system isn’t perfect, and I think that Mail-In-Voting would make it more secure, but there really are safeguards built into the systems to prevent fraudulent voting. Now, rigging they system to only allow those you want to vote, well, that’s another issue (and one that Mail-In-Voting makes more difficult).
The “explanation” is “they” got better. After the 2016 election, I heard Rush Limbaugh claim that there was a suspicious flood of Clinton votes at the end as “they” tried to steal the election, but “they” miscalculated and fell short.
That’s exactly the sort of situation that ranked-choice systems (there are a wide variety of them) would fix. In a ranked-choice system, the voters who had one Democrat as their first place would probably have had other Democrats in their other high-ranked places, and so ultimately all of the Democratic votes would be consolidated on whomever the most popular Democrat was. And likewise for the Republicans, of course.
An aside, by the way, about Republicans previously supporting mail-in votes: One of the many factors in Florida in 2000 that resulted in the less-popular candidate winning was a number of mail-in ballots from the military, that were not submitted according to proper procedures, but were nonetheless counted.