Election Digression

I accidentally deleted this post, and it was such an emotional post that the deletion almost makes it worse.  It was and is important to me, though, so I'm going to try to recreate it to the extent I can.

Friday, 20 November 2020

I said I knew I was a week and a half behind in my posts and that I absolutely would get caught up as quickly as I could.  But I said I had something to say about the post-election situation and, since this is my blog, I wanted to say it.

I said my heart is breaking.

I said I completely understand being bitterly disappointed in the outcome of an election, that I've felt that way many times and expect to feel that way again.

I said I completely understand, and agree, that a losing candidate has the right to be certain all the votes were correctly counted.

But we've done that.  Recounts have been held.  Court cases have been brought and decided by judges appointed by both political parties.  That should mean the election is now over.  

Our democracy rests on the principle that we citizens choose who we want to be in charge of our government by voting and that, however misguided the majority might seem at times (e.g. McCarthyism, Japanese-American internments), what the majority says goes.  No matter how badly I or anyone else might want an election to show a different result, we're stuck with the one we've got until the next election.

To me, this election showed that a majority of Americans wants Republicans to be in a position of power.  Republicans picked up seats in the House and still hold a majority in the Senate.  But what a majority also wants is to have someone other than Donald Trump as president.

It's pretty clear that many people split their tickets when they voted, however deeply unpalatable this idea is to the president and incomprehensible to his most ardent supporters.

There's no other mathematical explanation for the results than that, despite all the contortions I've been hearing about in the news.  It's absurd to think that this Dominion-whatever-the-company-is software changed votes from Trump to Biden only in specific states and not in others where it's used - e.g. Florida and Utah.  It's absurd to think that the software would be programmed to give a Democratic win in the presidency and not in all the other races farther down the ballot.

It's equally absurd to think that it's even possible to achieve fraud on a level that would encompass the entire country.  There were more than 150,000,000 votes cast.  If our elections were done by the federal government, or even by the governments of each of the states, that might be remotely possible.  But instead, each state sets guidance and limits within the state, and those are then carried out by each individual county.  Our elections in the United States are conducted by thousands of counties, overseen by dozens of states, each with their own idiosyncratic ways of doing the same thing - electing a slate of leaders.  A fraud that can influence that sort of system is almost certainly impossible, which is why it's never been done before.  Any fraud we've had in our elections - and, let's face it, there's been plenty over the years - has been done on a local level.

And although the president and his allies have been saying over and over that there's fraud and there's evil software and various other claims, so far the only evidence they've presented has shown human error on a small scale.  And the reason is that it not only doesn't exist - it can't exist in our system of voting.

Up to this point, I've figured we're looking at the deep disappointment and disbelief that can come from a disappointed candidate and those who support him.  But once again, that's all been resolved by various courts of law.  We should be done with this election.

So what's bothering me so much is Rudy Giuliani, on behalf of the president, telling a Pennsylvania judge he should ignore all the ballots cast in that state and instead appoint - APPOINT - electors who will vote for Trump.  

And even beyond that is the president himself who's been leaning all over state elected officials trying to get them to change the results, and leaning all over state legislators to convince them to throw out the results of the election and APPOINT electors of their own choosing.  They're both saying we should forget that we live in a democracy and instead have the current leader simply set up a system that will allow him to stay in office.

But to me even worse than these events, ghastly as they are, is that almost all Republican officials are staying silent while this happens.  At what point do they find backbone against this attempt to subvert our system of government?  Ever?  I feel confident they'd find plenty of backbone if it were a Democrat who was doing all of this, so why on earth not a member of their own party?  Do they really believe the Republican party is more important than democracy in the United States of America?

And so my heart is breaking to watch this unfold.  It's been causing me great unhappiness as it's continued.

But on the other hand, I am a big believer in my country.  I remember the real distress around the country when Kennedy was assassinated and have come to appreciate as an adult the way Johnson took over so quickly to help stabilize us all.  I remember the terror I felt when Nixon resigned, because it was unprecedented and I was afraid our system wasn't resilient enough to handle it.  And I was then and continue to be grateful to Pres. Ford for the sheer decency and honor that made up his nature.  He wasn't able to do much in his term, thanks to the chaos that Nixon had unleashed, but he kept us going on a stable path, which is what we needed.

The parallels to the chaos we find ourselves in today are becoming obvious.  And once again we have in Joe Biden a person who is decent and honorable.  I know many who use Fox News and similar sources to learn the news don't believe that, because they've been told differently for many months now.  But it's still a fact, and I think many of them will come to see it.  Even if he's able to do little more in the next four years besides return stability and honor to our country, he'll be appreciated and respected.

You can tell I feel very strongly about all this, and I just wanted to say so, even though it meant rewriting it.