Happy Tuesday Faithful FRians! Almost the end of 2020, thanks goodness. Today’s post is by Stephen. Thank you, sir!
The recent presidential election has been and remains highly contested because of many and varied voting irregularities including dead people voting, 4am vote dumps, continued vote counting after voting officially “stopped”, fraudulent water leaks, poll watchers illegally excluded, mass printed ballots, executive rewriting of election laws, inexplicable voter turnout, stacks of votes counted multiple times, hackable voting machines, statistically anomalous data, late ballots fraudulently dated, among many other “problems”.
The list is so varied and extensive that it is nearly impossible to focus on any single issue or limited set of issues, and the evidence so overwhelming that any person who is paying attention has now doubt in their mind as to the reality of a massive nationwide vote fraud.
Yet, many people are thoroughly convinced that there is no evidence and all of the claims listed above are nothing more than baseless speculation attributable to questionable sources which have been rejected time and again by courts across the country. In the alternative, they dismiss all claims of vote fraud as impossible to prove that they were material, i.e. that they would have altered the outcome of the election.
The frustration at this tumultuous mess created by the high-speed blender process of our American election system, or some vague semblance of a system, has created a form of writer’s block for me in recent weeks; in part because the mathematician in me cannot conceive how people can be so dismissive of exceedingly improbable, if not impossible, events; in part because of a desire to present objective factual information when every attempt at actual investigation is repeatedly stonewalled or simply ignored.
It is the court shenanigans and public confusion which ought to be addressed in a more abstract manner, a more enlightened view of mass foolishness. What is a vote anyway? Who owns a vote? Who is it, exactly, that is harmed by vote fraud? When is vote fraud actionable? By whom? What is the proper authority overseeing elections anyway?
So what is a vote?
Suffrage, or the voting privilege, is afforded to those who are not notorious criminals (having committed a felony), who are both citizens and residents, who are over 18 years of age, who have registered with the state attesting to those facts. On its face a very simple criteria.
The vote is the stated preference for whom should hold an office of public trust. An election is a simple summation of those stated preferences by those legally entitled to vote for such office. (I would personally limit the franchise to those who were not employed by that very level of government for which they are casting votes.)
Traditionally, all the people would be at the poll and would be present for the paper ballots to be tallied at the end of the night, or even vote by ancient method of standing to one side of the room or another and simply counting the people; the basic idea of a caucus. Much like many prize giveaways, you must be present to win; in this case you must be present to make sure your vote gets counted.
Somewhere along the line we got comfortable with letting other people count our ballots when we were not there, on anonymous identical pieces of paper, far removed from the polling station. This eventually lead to letting machines, then computers, count the votes.
On an individual level, one fraudulent vote for yellow negates the vote of a green voter. When allowing women the vote, it was argued that some contentious wives might simply cancel their husband’s vote, so how does it become acceptable for a fraudulent vote to cancel the man’s vote? Though there is an objective injury, our court system does not recognize the injury to the voter of canceling their vote.
However, there is a more pressing question rooted in those ancient voting practices. How do you even know that your vote was actually counted? If there is no interest in having your vote cancelled, ought there at least be in interest in counting your vote in the first place?
When it was placed in the box and you got to watch the votes actually counted from that box, you could rest assured that one of those votes was yours and that it was indeed counted. In an age where your package is tracked by identification number from the factory to your door and every stop in between, why can you not track your vote once it is placed and be certain that the candidate for whom you voted received your vote?
The vote is not the property of the voter any longer. You can’t sue if it is countered, you don’t even know if it was cast or if it was changed. The voter has no standing in court.
Is it the candidate’s vote?
In the 2000 election, due to certain ambiguities in the format of Florida’s so-called “butterfly ballots”, it was claimed that a number of people inadvertently voted for Pat Buchanan when they intended to vote for Al Gore. In the words of Mr. Buchanan, if the votes were cast for him even in error, they were his votes and it would be improper to try to determine the intent of the voter after the fact.
Certainly a losing candidate has standing to sue in court for fraud where the individual voter does not as the court recognized the losing of an election, and thus lost income, as an injury. However, like the voter the candidate has no real access to the actual votes to prove that fraud which they might allege.
The individual candidate is placed at pains by the court to prove any fraud independent of access to the actual votes. The low level candidate is largely dependent upon the party machinery of poll watchers, exit polling, canvassing of voter rolls and such in order to acquire any evidence of vote fraud.
Moreover, in order to even get into court merely proving vote fraud is not sufficient, you have to demonstrate with specificity vote fraud of sufficient magnitude to have changed the actual outcome of the election just to maintain a case. So while technically the courts recognize that a candidate has a vested interest in the vote totals, they do not have possession and ownership of the votes themselves. Thus it becomes an empty and meaningless standing to sue with the burden of proof stacked against the candidate.
Thus, you can’t really say that a candidate actually owns the votes which are cast for him. He has no possession in the language of that old adage that possession is 9/10 of the law.
In the search for ownership of the votes, who has possession of the ballots?
Pretty much the Secretary of States of the individual states possess the paper ballots, and they control the counting of those ballots. Well, they did when there were paper ballots. Now that there are increasingly voting computers which create digital records, and the courts have recognized that the counting software is itself corporate property, it is more proper to say that the votes belong to the companies running the machines.
There still remain printed ballots from those machines but many of them have no way to verify that the votes they actually print are the votes which were cast and than the votes which were scanned are actually the votes which were counted.
Proprietary software makes the true possessor of the votes the one who counts the votes, or more specifically the owners of the vote count. To the extent that the votes remain paper, the votes remain the property of the state executives.
Which brings us to process claims, such as we have seen in several recent lawsuits which point out that the legislature is supposed to set the rules of process for the election. The claims being that the executive branch, particularly several different Secretary of State offices at the state level exceeded their authority by making up their own election rules contrary to the written law of the legislative branch.
Interestingly the Texas case pointed out that Pennsylvania rigging their election in a national presidential election deprived Texas of their Constitutional protections by cancelling not a single voter’s vote, but an entire state’s in the electoral college. The unprecedented move of the Supreme Court denying a case in which they have original rather than appellate jurisdiction sets a bad precedent of washing their hands of the whole affair while they condemn the voter to the tender mercies of the mobs.
As is the case of conflict between any two branches of government, the third branch becomes the arbiter of who is correct. In the present case the courts have sided with the executive branch to the effect that the executive branch now writes the laws. A very bizarre outcome and abandonment of the very principles of a civilized republic.
Going forward, as things now appear to stand, can we expect Republican counties and states to withhold the tallies of their votes until after those Democrat cities have turned in their votes? When fraud is this obvious and it is permitted to stand, the only counter to it becomes fraud in the other direction.
Which brings us back to the original question, whose vote is it? Does it matter? If the vote is lost amidst the counting, and the counting is no longer about the actual votes but the pretense of totals, if fraudulent votes count as heavily as real votes, then owning the vote is like owning a cup of water in the midst of a flood.
Sorry to be so pessimistic in a Monday post, but such has been my reaction of late. I shall endeavor to pursue more productive topics henceforth.
