Saturday 12 September 2020

It has become obvious to me that the Republican Party is stealing the 2020 election. 

They are stealing it behind our backs and they are stealing it in front of our faces.  All you have to do to come to this conclusion is spend some time researching targeted voter sabotage as practiced by the Republicans since at least 2000. 

But, instead of looking at the evidence and making a plan for what to do when the Republicans pull off yet another theft of a major election, the Democratic Party, the corporate media and regular citizens are busily waltzing off a cliff in a haze of self-congratulatory delusion.  If, they tell us, we just go out and vote, Trump will be defeated, and all will be well.

I do not believe this to be true.  I do not believe it to be true because I cannot look at the evidence that is available and come to that conclusion.

One of the first things you learn as a researcher is to question most what you want to believe.  People in this country WANT to believe that the voting process is fair, that all they have to do is vote.  There is an almost pig-headed refusal to look at the evidence that the voting system is not fair, has been rigged in the past, is being rigged now, and that rigging will likely determine the outcome of the 2020 election.

The Democratic Party leadership and party strategists desperately want to believe that all they have to do is put out ads, analyze polls, make campaign appearances (sometimes) and get out the vote.  This is all they know – conventional campaign tactics.  And, they simply refuse to accept the fact that we have entered a world in which conventional campaign strategies are meaningless.  I don’t care how many polls you analyze, or how well you analyze them, if the vote count is manipulated, your effort will be irrelevant. 

But, on the corporate news programs I listen to hour after hour of discussion of the polls and demographics, and likely voter turn-out.  Corporate news pundits giddily and endlessly talk to other corporate news pundits, none of them willing to acknowledge the fact that if the Republicans do in this election what they have been doing in other elections for two decades, none of the polls and none of the analysis, is relevant.  This means, of course, that the pollsters and strategists themselves are not relevant, and that is one thing they will never admit.  So, they lie to themselves and they lie to us.

With this lie, they make us believe that a corrupted voting system is fair because THEY WANT TO BELIEVE THAT IT IS FAIR.  If it is not fair, if all the traditional campaign strategies are useless, they might have to DO SOMETHING.  They might have to stop rabbiting on endlessly on cable news, stop comparing each other’s living rooms, stop telling jokes and selling a “return to civic grace” as the answer to all our problems.  They might have to do something.  And, that’s the problem.

The demographics of the voting population, the polls, getting out the vote, promoting mail-in ballots, won’t make a damn bit of difference if the Republicans at the state and county level manipulate the vote count to win as they have done in the past.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that they will not manipulate the vote count and a great deal of evidence that they will.  But, by ignoring this fact, the DNC, the strategists and the pollsters and the corporate news pundits keep themselves at the center of a rat wheel of influence, money, talk and activity.

The result, I fear, is that once again on November 4, we will be sitting in our homes looking at stunned corporate media pundits, strategists and pollsters disoriented and wondering how Donald Trump managed to win the electoral college yet again.  They will babble about how amazing it is that the exit polls (if we even have them) could be so wrong.  They will make the excuse that Trump voters don’t show up in the polling because they are ashamed to say they are voting for Trump.  But, they will never, never question the integrity of the voting process itself.

When Trump has apparently secured enough electoral college votes to win, there will be nothing the Democrats and the corporate media and the strategists and the pollsters will be prepared to do.  They will wring their hands and lament.  They will talk about writing strongly worded letters.  But, they will not question the validity of the results of the election and they will not fight to ensure that there is a fair election vote count.  They have never effectively done so in the past and they will not do so in 2020.

Between now and November 3, (in order to try not to go bat-shit crazy) I intend to examine and share the information that is available to demonstrate what is almost certain to happen on November 3. 

I am painfully aware that this is a process that makes people feel uncomfortable.  People do not want to examine or talk about the corruption of the voting system.  It’s inconvenient, it’s frightening, it’s paradigm changing and it means that they might have to DO SOMETHING. 

People struggle to hold on to what makes them feel safe, and if this election is stolen like others before it, it will mean that we will be living in a different world.  People are understandably afraid of that.  But, putting our heads in the sand will not save us.  On the contrary, I believe putting our heads in the sand will leave us disoriented, disorganized, demoralized and even more vulnerable to the onslaught of authoritarianism that will follow if Trump manages to remain in power.

The rights we think we have, the rights that we rely on to conduct daily life, will no longer exist for us, and that is a frightening prospect.  But, no matter how much we want to believe that all we have to do is get out and vote, that desire doesn’t make it a reality.

Even among the community of people who study election sabotage and who have been warning about hackable modems in voting machines, voting systems that cannot be audited, the purging of voter lists, outrageously biased voting rules and a hundred other things that can and will be used to alter the vote count, there is still the tendency to want to argue that “overwhelming turnout” can overcome any voter system sabotage that may occur. 

I simply cannot understand how this makes logical sense. 

If Republicans sabotage the vote count, turnout, “overwhelming” or otherwise will not make that vote count accurate.  If you can change vote tallies you can change thousands of votes or hundreds of votes.  I have asked this question over and over to various experts in the field.  The best answer I get is a rather weak statement about how “overwhelming voter turnout” will make it harder to alter the vote.

But, I don’t even understand the logic of this.  Why will it make it harder?  And how? 

I can cast a vote for one candidate, but I cannot in any way determine how other people in my country cast their votes.  If the county says that I was the only person voting for Biden in the entire county, how am I supposed to contest that?  I have no access to the actual votes.  I have no idea how other people voted.  And, evidently in Georgia, there is not even an auditable vote count. So even if people in authority demanded a “recount,” it wouldn’t make vote sabotage any clearer.

In the state of Georgia, a recount of the votes involves nothing more than putting computer generated ballots through the same scanners a second time.  A human being cannot determine by looking at these ballots who the voter voted for.  The actual vote is recorded in a bar code that is unreadable by a human.  So, a recount is just recounting the same ballots (which might be manipulated) all over again.  That is useless.

I don’t know what to do but try to put together for myself the evidence leading to the conclusion that the Republican Party will successfully steal this election.  It’s there now.  There’s no need to wait until the election to see the outlines of the methods Republicans are using to manipulate the vote.  They are doing it before our eyes.

If you have information, please let me know.  If you have information refuting the supposition, please let me know also.  If you find an argument weak, suggest another one.  I’m open to all reputable information and welcome all critique.  But, I cannot stand silent behaving as if I believe that voting is going to oust Trump and the Republicans.  They have too much to lose to allow this vote to go against them.  And, delusion is dangerous.  In this case will only leave us totally unprepared for dealing with the outcome of another stolen election.

I hope I’m wrong about this.  I truly hope I am wrong, but I do not think I am.