The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane — Marcu Aurelius
By James Howard Kunstler - November 11, 2022
What’s up with dragging out the vote count in Arizona and Nevada, promising to deliver the last 20-percent of the count by a certain hour and then missing the deadline more than once, while dribbling out a few packets of, shall we say, choice cuts, here and there? I’ll tell you what: an organized mind-fuck. They are aiming to demoralize their adversaries and exhaust them psychologically so that when victory finally comes, the winners will be too emotionally depleted to do their end-zone dances — and the voters will be too dispirited to cheer.
In Arizona, of course, you have the peculiar situation in which the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor, Katie Hobbs, happens to be the state secretary of state, meaning the official in charge of elections. You’d think she’d be embarrassed at blowing two ballot counts in a row, or that a court somewhere might show an interest in her amazingly convenient incompetence in this particular official duty. In any case, the drama continued through early morning Friday.
The catch was that almost all the still-outstanding ballots were cast by Election Day voters, rather than mail-ins. Election Day votes are statistically more likely to have been cast by Republicans, who dislike and avoid sketchy mail-in ballots, and are thus likely to overwhelmingly favor Katie Hobbs’s opponent, Kari Lake, the charismatic former TV news reporter who, on the campaign trail, made Ms. Hobbs look about as appealing as a barrel cactus.
Delaying the final vote count also provides cover for some of the most common election shenanigans, such as manufacturing extra votes or “finding” boxes of overlooked ballots stashed under tables and in broom closets. Gee! Lookit what’s here! Alleged President “Joe Biden,” beneficiary of Ms. Hobbs’s 2020 election supervision, predicted weeks ago that election results would be many a’day coming in. That was a setup too, of course, and though Joe Biden said it to the TV cameras, most likely it was something that Lawfare ninja Marc Elias thought-up and whispered in White House Chief of Staff’s Ron Klain’s ear, who told “Joe Biden” to say it.
The basic Democratic Party election strategy in recent decades has been to turn the voting public into so many millions of proverbial froggies in the pot of water set to slowly rise to boiling so that the froggies don’t notice they’re getting cooked until it’s too late to jump out of the pot. They have slowly and systematically changed the methods of voting and counting the votes, especially to eliminate accountability for the massive scams and screw-ups that have occurred recently. The changes have been accepted as normal.
One insidious change was shutting down all the small local precinct polling places in churches and schools, where it was easy to get in, get your signature checked, and vote on-site, and where the precinct captains and workers were known and accountable to voters in the neighborhood . Instead, the Lawfare gang got states to consolidate all the action in huge impersonal voting centers — often sports arenas — where hundreds of election workers churn and all sorts of frauds went unnoticed in the enormous shuffle of activity.
It was also harder to get in and vote at such a giant venue when thousands showed up and long lines formed — which made it easier for interested parties to justify the expansion of mail-in balloting. It’s just possible that Covid-19 was introduced in 2020 to make sure that Election Day in-person voting would look hazardous, with mail-ins becoming the dominant method. It sure helped get rid of Donald Trump.
Among the conclusions of the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by (Democratic) former president Carter and (Republican) former Secretary of State James Baker, was that mail-in voting is the easiest way to invite cheating and fraud. Apparently, no one listened except Lawfare’s Marc Elias, who saw that as a good thing. What we got starting in 2020 and continuing today are the creative refinements of that, as fraudsters apply their zillions of dollars to new ways of stealing elections — as Mark Zuckerberg did in Wisconsin, literally switching out local election officials with Democratic Party activists.
Then there are the as-yet-unresolved issues with the Dominion voting machines and their software. Are the machines enabled to hook into the internet? It seems to me that this has been proven. Why is it so hard to admit that these machines are janky and unnecessary. A thousand voices have pointed out that many other nations, France, for instance, use only paper ballots and manage to report the election results the night of. Arizona is a whole helluva lot smaller than France, and even Florida, which thoroughly reformed its election laws under Governor DeSantis and published the midterm results the same night.
Speaking of Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump . . .
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