The Election Question

there are many known unknowns

“Those 77 million people who voted for Trump AGAIN, and all those people who didn’t bother to vote, are the reason we’re in the mess we’re in.”

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read that on one forum or another, I’d have the money for a nice retreat to the woods, in our motorhome.

Given all the reporting from various quarters, the above statement is inaccurate, just on the face of it. There are so many parts of that assertion that affect the validity of the whole, they should be examined separately.

First, we have no idea how many people actually voted for the current Occupant in 2024. And without going into the questions surrounding the 2016 election (possible i.e., Russian interference), we don’t know who voted for him again. In my own opinion, the Occupant’s surprise and rage over the 2020 results is an indication that he tried to subvert it, as well, and failed, possibly because he and his minions underestimated the turnout for Biden. But I have no immediate support for that conclusion, and it’s beyond the scope of this post.

So, 2024. In his earlier rallies, the Occupant promised his supporters that if they voted for him that year, they’d never have to vote again. To me, that pronouncement indicated he had already formulated a plan to remain in office past 2028, and/or there would be some machinery in place so that the Oval Office would never have to be surrendered to anyone but a designated successor. Ominous enough.

In later rallies, the Occupant commented that those supporters present didn’t even have to vote for him, because there were “already” enough votes to elect him. Was that typical orange-man bluster and hubris, or did he know for certain that the fix was in? Elon Musk’s bragging about the ease of altering voting software codes would at least suggest that corrupting the results had been discussed in the orange man’s circle.

Post-election, as the non-cult part of the nation heard the tallies with shock, more than one entity emerged to contest the outcome. There were murmurs of excessive numbers of bullet ballots (ballots on which only the Presidential election had been marked, with down-ballot races left blank); the statistical impossibility of Rump’s winning all the swing states; bought votes in Pennsylvania and elsewhere (courtesy of Elon); and other anomalies. The organization Election Truth Alliance has published a number of reports on these topics. For my part, I absolutely believe that Elon’s hacker posse compromised the vote tabulations. The point being that, without any audit—thanks to the Dems’ total inaction—there’s no unequivocal proof of vote count tampering. Neither, however, is there any assurance that the results were on the up-and-up.

Second, we don’t know how many people didn’t vote at all, or didn’t attempt to vote. Given the GOP’s bag of dirty tricks, there could be enough “missing” ballots, plus enough disqualified ballots and rejected voters, to have affected the results. Secretaries of State in red states—Georgia is an egregious example—purged voter rolls of tens of thousands for murky reasons. In many cases, voters weren’t aware that action had been taken until they showed up at their polling places. At that point, they could use provisional ballots, which could then be tossed because….reasons. Mail-in ballots could be disqualified for the smallest of technical reasons. IF voters were notified, they had to go to their boards of elections, to “cure” their ballots. Often, they didn’t have the time or the opportunity to go to their BOEs. They may have made an effort to cast a ballot, but election officials nullified that effort. Voter caging was another issue. It’s the shady practice of disqualifying a voter if a postcard mailed to them is returned by the post office, for any reason.

In several states, election rules were changed right before early voting had begun, causing confusion among some subsets of voters. Even now, the postal service has implemented a new rule: mail is only postmarked when it is processed, NOT when it’s received. That lag of perhaps a day could disqualify ballots mailed near Election Day. The rule was put in place for exactly the reason of rejecting ballots; significantly more Dems vote by mail than Republicans.

I’m going to digress a bit here and take up the issue of people who are eligible to vote, but don’t. It’s a near-universal criticism that if one doesn’t vote, it’s the equivalent of handing one’s vote to the other side. I’ve read reams of accusations along those lines from Dems. The assumption is that all those people who didn’t vote would have voted Dem, I guess, but their withholding their ballots gave the election to the Rs. In my view, the math doesn’t math there. Please do correct me if you see a flaw in my logic, but I think of it as splitting a pool of existing votes. If 100 people vote, and there are two candidates, each candidate has a chance of getting 51 votes, a winning tally. However, if only 90 people vote, each candidate has a chance to get 46 votes for the win. It doesn’t matter what the size of the pool is; each candidate is simply vying for a majority. Those ten people who abstained from voting did not, in effect, vote for one side or the other. All they did was to decrease the size of the pool of votes. That’s my reasoning, for what it’s worth.

To recap, from the coverage I’ve read, blaming those theoretical 77,000,000 people, plus non-voters, for the fact that orange man is back in office is both unjustified/incorrect and short-sighted. To carry the analysis further, suppose, for the sake of argument, the hacks and the vote suppression/disappearing did in fact occur. Would that not bode ill for this year’s midterms? If orange man and his best techbro buddy did indeed perfect a scheme to change vote tabulations, then no election is safe, going forward. Shouldn’t the Dems be investigating, just to be sure? Shouldn’t they be closely examining all the vote suppression tactics and locations? As it stands, they’re doing a very poor job of inspiring voters, but isn’t that all the more reason to do everything possible to secure every potential vote? It looks, though, as if they’re standing around, heads in the sand, not wanting to look at any nefarious goings-on across the aisle.

There have been a series of news stories about Rs’ attempts at gerrymandering, and then the counter-efforts of Dems in some states at their own gerrymandering. That potential outcome itself deserves close scrutiny. I don’t know if any Dems besides a couple of governors have looked into it; notably, Gavin Newsom. Newsom, by the way, has made the statement that Rump is indeed trying to rig the midterms and will likely attempt to eliminate the 2028 election, and people need to wake up.

His statement brings me to the 2026 election question, and my other hot button. That is, people who have ironclad, abiding faith that there will be a blue tsunami in November, and the Dems will take the House and possibly also the Senate, and then everything will be fixed. Orange man will be impeached and convicted, ICE will be either neutered or gone for good, the White House will be restored, and so on. I’m not betting the farm on it. In fact, I wouldn’t even bet a beer on it. We’ve read about ICE Barbie’s extortion letter to Tim Walz: if he turns over Minnesota’s voter information, the siege of his state will be over. We saw that the FBI has just grabbed all the 2020 votes and records from Georgia. That’s a sop to he who’s obsessed with proving he won there five-and-a-half years ago, but also, it provides the same information that Minnesota’s voter rolls would. Pammy Jo Blondi has gone after at least 44 states so far, to capture voter data. To date, 11 have complied. What could the purpose be for grabbing all those details? Maybe vote suppression or purging on an even bigger scale? I’d say that’s pretty much a given.

Even worse, I, for one, believe that orange man’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act (or rather, his handlers’ threats) are legitimate. I fully expect those running the government to create an altercation or incident to use as a pretext. The invocation gives the President extraordinary powers, and it’s my conviction that he/they will at least try to cancel or suspend the midterms. There are 26 GOP governors who might go along with the plan, and if even some of them agreed to not hold elections, it would throw any outcomes into question. When I’ve speculated on this scenario before, I’ve been told by some Dem stalwarts that it would be impossible for orange man to cancel elections, because they’re state controlled. To that, I’d refer them to his threats to nationalize elections. He’s spoken several times lately about canceling elections, as well, though he’s backtracked, claiming he was joking. I don’t believe it was a joke. He has a history of hinting around about his plans, then much later, acting on the things he just mentioned in passing. I continue to think there’s a non-zero chance that canceling or suspending elections could happen. Every time someone says Rump “couldn’t do” this or that, he’s proven that he can, in fact, commit any number of horrific, illegal acts, and no one can stop him. It’s patently illegal for him to blow up unarmed fishing boats absent due process, yet how many has he attacked and destroyed, along with murdering the passengers? Taking our military into a sovereign nation and kidnapping its president and first lady, meanwhile killing dozens of civilians, is a war crime of the first order. Has the Felon been accused by the UN and brought up on charges? Given those extreme violations of national and international law, how could anyone think he wouldn’t dare to try to eliminate midterms in the U.S.?

In the end, I’m convinced that at least the 2024 election was corrupted, and orange man and his evil crew will try their utmost to do the same with the midterms, if any. If there ever was a hair-on-fire moment for the Dems, it’s now. Apparently, however, complacency will continue to be their downfall, and they’ll go on blaming everyone besides themselves. Short of some kind of unforeseen, earth-shaking event, it looks as if an enormous wrench is going to be thrown into that blue take-over.