I was doing an Internet search this morning in regard to some topic or other, and one link took me to a page on the Snopes site.
Now you recall Snopes, of course. It is the supposed "fact checker" that we're all supposed to go to to verify this or that tale, or urban legend, or other supposition. Snopes used to give us what we assumed was a reliable validation or debunking of rumors and stories we'd heard for years.
That was then, of course.
I started to notice during the Trump Administration that the text accompanying the fact-checking in Snopes articles had gotten awfully biased and extremely anti-Trump. This is particularly concerning, given that not everything associated with Trump is by definition bad, wrong or evil, and if your fact-checking always comes down on the bad, wrong and evil side, you've blown your reliability index.
When I reviewed the Snopes link that my search had sent me to, I noticed a few other links they were advertising between paragraphs, links to what I assume were either well-advertised pages or popular search results.
One had to do with the attacks on the U.S. Capitol building last month, perhaps as to whether a particular person who had been arrested had actually been a registered Democrat. Exactly what the article was about, though, isn't my point. I clicked.
My point is that in the text of the article, the references to the attack were simply over-the-top anti-Trump, suggesting that he had inspired the attacks (despite the recording that clearly show his reference to "peaceful" protests, and ignoring the fact that the bombs planted outside the two parties' headquarters had been put there the previous day, before Trump said anything).
They were so anti-Trump, in fact, that they included curious references to the concerns about the election day ballot counting in multiple states, in the sense of their calling it a lie about widespread voter fraud.
Now the extra-harsh language about the allegations of voter fraud were bizarre for a site that claims to be the be-all and end-all of accurate fact-checking. For them to say that President Trump had no grounds to complain about widespread voter fraud is one thing, but to describe the claims as being unfounded in very strong language is quite another.
I say that because I watched, literally end to end, the testimony before state legislative committees in five states -- Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia -- describing the observations of witness after witness, all of whom pointed out where very similar efforts were undertaken in each state to corrupt the legitimacy of the ballot.
Each was a full day-long hearing, and for the most part the witnesses were only given five minutes to describe what they saw. That makes for a lot of witnesses in the day, if you do the math, or even if you don't.
What did they describe? Poll-watchers being prevented from observing signature checking, or from observing ballot counting, or from observing pretty much anything, being kept far away from reading distance.
They described thousands of ballots showing up without having been folded, as legitimate absentee ballots would have had to have been in order to be in the envelope they would have been sent out in -- if they were legitimate.
They described thousands of ballots being machine-printed rather than filled in by hand, which renders them invalid -- but they were counted, even though only the presidential vote was filled in, apparently alerting exactly zero election officials to the concern.
They described serious issues with voting technology that was provided through the courtesy of the wonderful, generous, benevolent souls who turned Venezuela into a fourth-world country.
They described batches of ballots -- and video confirmed this -- being run through counting machines multiple times, but only during a period when observers were sent home and couldn't see what was going on, having been told that no counting was to take place before the next morning.
They described similar midnight gaps where these states, and no others, were shut down from doing actual counts.
They described severe harassment and eviction of Republican poll watchers.
Was each one of them lying? That's a lot of lying, especially given that most of those who were confined to a five-minute testimony period submitted more detailed versions of their testimony under oath in written form, under penalty of perjury.
Not a single court has accepted jurisdiction to hear any of that testimony; it has all been done before state legislatures because the courts refuse to grant standing to any of the dozens of plaintiffs to press their case and find out what really happened. But Snopes, well, they summarily dismiss all of that collective testimony because, you know, Trump.
So here's the thing.
Trump isn't likely to run anymore; although I wouldn't put anything past him, it doesn't seem likely. But there will be a lot of elections in 2022 and especially 2024. The Senate map is favorable to Republicans both years, and 2024 is a presidential year.
The whole election fraud issue described in detail by witness after witness in state hearings worked. They got away with it, and the geriatric fool in the White House is prima facie evidence that it worked.
The left got away with it; they couldn't guarantee enough actual living, voting citizens would vote for their propped-up mannequin, so they made sure that between deceased, non-citizen and Xerox votes, they'd win.
They got away with it once. What is going to stop them in 2022? What would a Democrat/leftist-run House, Senate and White House do to investigate the 2020 election? What would that bloc do to ensure that the USA can trust future elections?
I do not trust future elections one bit. I do not trust the Republican end of the Swamp to do one thing to fix the problem, because to concede that the 2020 ballot wasn't perfect is to agree with President Trump, and they don't want to do that (with few exceptions).
Now what, indeed?
What kind of representative democracy can operate without the faith of the voting public in the mechanism of the ballot? Not this one.
I will go and vote, because I refuse to be an example for others who agree with me, to take any other tack. But I will have not a shred of trust in the process.
And that stinks.
Copyright 2021 by Robert Sutton
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Bear with me, because this is going to sound bad in places...
ReplyDeleteSo, the Dems got their way and pulled off a stolen election. They created, or more correctly, expanded voting methods of dubious validity such as mail in ballots that don't require any kind of vetting, as absentee ballots do.
Unless there is a mechanism for completely overturning the voting process in all 50 states, I want to suggest the following: We have to stop the crying and sniveling, and beat the Dems at their own game (legally, of course).
We need a Republican version of Stacy Abrams in each of the 50 states. We need to grab the mail-in ballot tool and use it. Door to door work that will get us more signed ballots and a few ballot dumps of our own will probably be the norm. At the end of the day this year, we didn't lose by that much. We can clobber them at their own game.
Democrats will be the hypocrites they have always been. They will scream about invalid votes and other irregularities, but when they lose a couple of elections there is a possibility that they might come to the table and negotiate a cleanup of the voting process.
Not bloody likely, but we will have found a way to win while they cheat.
I'm with you, of course, but we have to distinguish between the legitimate efforts that were done to register scads of people and knock on doors, vs. the illegal stuff -- the machine-printed ballots, the xeroxing of ballots, the multiple counting. For all the latter, we have to be able to prevent it from happening and send off flares the second they do, AND most importantly, to have legitimate law enforcement queued up to respond in a second.
DeleteYou're right. Who the heck on our side is going to raise that torch?
We have two years to make sufficient progress. States like GA and PA and AZ should have been more accommodating to the observers but they weren't. Here in GA the Atlanta areas are dominated by Democrat operatives, but the legislature could pass a law mandating that observers be able to view all ballots upon request.
ReplyDeleteAt the very least, some of the places that they were able to obstruct viewing and to get observers removed who complained should be fixed.
I always want to do this legally. Republicans aren't smart enough to cheat, and they will get caught while Democrats won't. But canvassing and filling out ballots with signatures should be doable.