Wednesday, 05 August 2020_Donald Trump has a habit of sparking outrage. And he's done it again by telling his supporters in North Carolina to vote twice in the November election. He says they should vote in person and also cast a mail-in ballot, which is a crime.
Donald Trump has a habit of sparking outrage. And he's done it again by telling his supporters in North Carolina to vote twice in the November election. He says they should vote in person and also cast a mail-in ballot, which is a crime.
And asked to explain, he said, “Well, let them go vote and if the system is as good as they say it is, then obviously they won't be able to vote in person.” So he's suggesting that they commit a crime, and the system should catch them. And presumably, arrest them. So everything will be fine.
Well, that's kind of amusing. I imagine Trump will next be telling his supporters to rob banks, and if the security systems in the banks are as good as they say they are, then they will be prevented from stealing any money.
You know, you can't make this stuff up. Trump, whatever else you want to say about him, is always good for a laugh—although it's a laugh tinged with sardonic black humor, because he's a symptom of the decadence and depravity of American society, as well as the short attention span of people in this culture.
Now Trump's bizarre statements about the election and the voting process, and his attempt to shut down the US Post Office or at least sabotage it to make it more difficult for people to vote by mail, does highlight a real problem here in the United States, which is that our elections are not secure and they are not well run, and that we cannot have faith that the votes are being counted accurately. That much is true. But Trump has not explained the real reasons for this.
Trump has made all kinds of diversionary statements about how supposedly mail-in voting will encourage fraud, even though there's no evidence of that. And that people sometimes vote twice—and now he's telling people to vote twice—but in the past, that hasn't happened. There's no documentation of any significant amount of that kind of fraud.
The kind of fraud we've seen in the United States, beginning decades ago, has consisted of organized crime organizing large numbers of deceased people, and nonexistant people, to cast ballots. That has happened. But much more importantly, since the early 2000s and the passing of the Help America Vote Act in 2003 in the wake of the Bush v. Gore hanging chad scandals, the black box voting machines, owned by billionaire Republicans, have been consistently overcounting Republican votes and undercounting Democratic votes.
And this is a fact, regardless of which party you prefer. I don't prefer either one. I have no use for Democrats or Republicans. But the fact is that for whatever reason, it seems that Republicans own the voting machine companies. These voting machines count votes by software that is proprietary software that nobody except the people that own the companies are allowed to look at.
And so our votes are allegedly being counted, but we can't see them being counted, and we have no reliable way of verifying that the votes are being counted correctly.
And in fact, a massive amount of evidence shows that in key elections since 2003 there has been a sudden, huge divergence between the exit polls and the ostensible results. And in virtually every single case that diversion has been in favor of Republicans who have won elections that in reality they should have lost, including the 2004 presidential election which was stolen by George W. Bush against John Kerry. And we've seen this pattern repeatedly.
So, if Trump told the truth about this, he would be telling us that we need a more secure election system with hand-counted paper ballots and a way of verifying votes and voters, and that can be done. Many countries in the world have secure election systems. But as Jimmy Carter, the former US president has said, the United States of America doesn't.
So let's hope that Trump will start making true outrageous statements such as telling us that our voting machines are probably rigged. But I don't think he'll do that because the people rigging them are members of the party that he represents.
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