Hello fellow FRians! We have Stephen’s post of the week today. Thank you so much, as always, Stephen.
An oft employed euphemism for a blind process where on the one side something goes into the proverbial “black box” and something comes out the other side as a product but there is no information to the observer how that product was created from those inputs inside the box.
We are currently experiencing across a number of various states in America late counting and apparently a rash of “found” votes, rumors and allegations across Twitter of voting boxes turning up in odd places. Are these rumors and allegations true? Are assertions of eye witnesses correct that blank ballots were being filled out by election officials? Are people voting multiple times? Are dead people voting? Are illegal aliens voting?
Project Veritas has video of election officials saying that it is okay for illegal aliens to vote if they have a drivers’ license and are registered. We know that Al Franken was elected due to some “missing” voting boxes turning up in someone’s trunk, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/15/editorial-ballot-box-wizardry/, or do we? Seems that such tales are categorically denied. https://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2008/11/minneapolis-election-director-speaks-ballots-my-car-story-false/
It is easy to get outraged over a report of some fraud perpetrated by Democrats reported on Twitter; or votes suppressed by Republicans as reported by the mainstream media, which is even less reliable. However, most of such reports turn out to be lacking in actual evidence upon closer scrutiny and examinations.
Delving into the actual facts and not the rumor mill swill is what legal cases are designed to do and what no form of gossip channeling, whether Twitter, Facebook, NY Times, or CBS, will ever accomplish. Is there an abundance of election irregularities occurring in the present midterm elections? There absolutely are.
Is this unprecedented? Is it a calamity which will signal the downfall of the republic like the breaking of a seal of Revelations or the sounding of some angelic trumpet? Calm down.
It is refreshing to know that no matter how bad things are at present, no matter how corrupt and depraved our elections and their overseeing officials appear, that things can get much, much worse, and have been in the past.
Doesn’t sound refreshing to you? Odd that.
The reader may be interested in a little of the original history and foundation of earlier perspective on suffrage and the exercise of the franchise: http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Spring07/elections.cfm
Understand that in the early part of our nation’s history, particularly on about the middle of the 1800s, vote fraud, indeed violence, intimidation, bribery, and even kidnaping were employed as political tools. It has even been theorized that such may have lead to the death of one Edgar Allen Poe. To combat this rampant fraud and manipulation of the vote, America turned to the “voting machine”, a technological solution to the basic problems of human nature. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/voting-booths-were-a-radical-19th-century-reform-to-stop-election-fraud
Of course, I know from personal experience that such voting booths can be and have been rigged to not count votes, or to tabulate votes in accordance to some person’s wishes rather than accurate tabulations of real votes.
I remember going into such a voting booth, flipping the little switches beside the named candidates, and stopping. Something didn’t seem right. When you flipped some switches you could feel resistance as the switch moved the levers in the machine to register the vote, but other switches had no resistance at all. They were not attached to any levers. So, I experimented by flipping a number of switches just to feel the presence or absence of such pressure. Turns out that while you could vote for federal offices of either party, you could not on that machine vote for any Republican at the state or local level, but you could vote for the Democrat candidate for such offices.
Now they have moved on to more sophisticated devices, electronic this time, though some states still used the antiquated mechanical apparatus. The problem is, was, and shall continue to be the same, the black box.
When you cast a ballot, any ballot, you place it into a box, if you do not watch that box to make certain that nobody tampers with it until the ballots are removed, you don’t really know that it has not been. If you do not see the votes actually counted before your eyes, you do not know that your vote was actually counted at all. You can never be certain that other precincts counted their votes correctly. And when the totals are returned from all the precincts, you can not be certain that the totals are what they are reported unless you double check their work and tabulate the results yourself.
The more complicated the system, and the larger the system becomes, the more of a black box it becomes, the less you can be confident in the legitimacy of the results. This is why in the old laws regarding paper ballots very specific prescriptions of how the votes were to be counted and who was to be present for the counting were set in law. Many of safeguards were cast aside once they convinced people to go to mechanical voting.
Instead of counting the votes at the precinct in which they were cast in front of representatives of each party called out loud so that everyone present could keep their own count then posted on the door of every precinct so that anyone could go from precinct to precinct and tabulate the results for themselves, the modern system took the ballots out of the sight of the voters transported them to a centralized location to be counted, and one had to just take their word for it that they were counted correctly, and no votes were added or taken away in the process.
Now we have moved in many locations to electronic voting machines, admittedly some with paper recordings which I don’t know are ever even seen by human eyes, and we simply hope that the computer program will add all of the votes simply and accurately, though we are note even allowed to look at the program coding to make certain. It has more literally than ever become the proverbial black box as the electronic voting machines are literally black plastic boxes.
To add extra complication, and thus to magnify the opportunity and probability of vote fraud, most places no longer really even have precincts. A precinct is a place where the casting of votes can be supervised to try to prevent fraud and coercion in the casting of votes. The idea of a voting booth was to prevent one person from filling out the ballot of another or someone telling that person how to fill out the ballot.
However, now we accept “mail-in” ballots, thus completely defeating the very purpose of preventing fraud and coercion that the voting booth and precincts were adopted to prevent. Add to that the concept of “early” voting where a person can cast their vote weeks ahead of an actual election. There can be no guarantee that the person who filled out the early mail-in ballot was the voter except by the signature if they have it on file, and that seems rather prone to manipulation. And, unlike previous times, mail-in ballots make it even easier to cast votes in multiple states or precincts. On top of this, add in the concept of “provisional” ballots, which are votes which are for some reason questionable, including if someone is already on record voting early in your name, which only get counted if the election is “close”.
For more information, please consult: http://votefraud.org/
Oddly, the courts of more of a hindrance than assistance in looking into the matter of voting irregularities, because in order present a case of vote fraud you have to have sufficient specific evidence of the vote fraud that you don’t actually need the discovery by which you could actually obtain the specific evidence you need.
All of this leads to a different type of analysis of the black box process. We must look at the process from the picture of the results from a different mathematical or logistical approach than the normal way in which one searches for proof.
This brings us to the glaring problem more and more people are noticing, that every single time that these irregularities occur, they tend to only help one particular political party. Mathematically speaking one would expect that such irregularities would tend to largely favor one party over the other because of the nature of the voters expected to be subject to such an irregularity, and not the 50/50 split non-mathematical people might presume to expect.
However, neither would your expect the result to be 100% in favor of a single party, these late vote finds and counts always favor the Democrats. As more such events occur with a 100% slant to one side, the more it mathematically points to a near certainty of fraud.
On the other side, those on the left will say that the found votes are the result of a systematic “suppression” of the vote by the Republicans, though they can never really explain just by what mechanism those votes are being suppressed. To give them there due, a systematic suppression of votes on one side would also explain the one-sided nature of the late found votes always favoring one side and not a more expected ratio.
In law there is a lovely expression, “Ipsa res loquitur”, or “The thing speaks for itself”. First coined in an alleged case of negligence where a man was walking by a shop and was struck by a barrel of flour from a window above the shop, seriously injuring him. https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/collages/17873 “A barrel could not roll out of a warehouse without some negligence, and to say that a plaintiff who is injured by it must call witnesses from the warehouse to prove negligence seems to me preposterous.” Id.
Which brings up the final consideration in looking at the obvious and unnatural bias of this black box process as to whether it point to fraud or suppression. It is the question of who is in control of those counties and precincts where the found votes arise. One could claim that “voter suppression” was to blame if all of those found votes were found in Republican counties, or it would point to “vote fraud” if all of those late found votes were in Democrat counties.
They are all in Democrat counties. The systemic one-sided nature of the error defies a less troublesome explanation. It appears as something seriously wrong is occurring in the black box of our voting systems.
