The Count, The Audit, and The Crazy
We are undoubtedly not going to persuade each other on the vote fraud stuff. My position is that it is real, but not substantial enough to overturn the election.
My position is also that the President has the right to challenge results and there is no real need to rush the closure of the election. He should be allowed to pursue all avenues and legal strategies available to him.
Additionally, I think it would behoove the Secretary of State of Georgia to do a manual recount of the paper ballots in Georgia. There are a lot of people nationwide who distrust the electronic voting machines. Georgia is one of the states where people are alleging the state was stolen via electronic voting machine malfunction.
The Georgia Secretary of State could put everyone at ease by actually counting the paper ballots. In Georgia, votes are cast on a touch screen connected to a printer. The printer then prints the ballots with a QR code. The ballot is then fed into a ballot holding machine with a scanner on top. As the voter puts the ballot into the machine, the machine scans the QR code and tabulates the results. The results should align with the votes actually displayed on the paper ballot.
If Georgia counts the paper ballots, they should match what the machine counted. If not, well then the conspiracists are on to something. If they match, suddenly a whole lot of people will have more faith in the election.
It needs to happen.
Concurrent to all of this, what needs to not happen is the current bat-crap craziness on MSNBC and among blue checkmarks on Twitter who are convinced the President is about to launch a military take over of America.
For those not paying attention, the President fired the Secretary of Defense and several others of the top civilian staff at the Pentagon. This has led to hysterical claims that the President is launching a coup.
Go over to MSNBC and it is full-blown panic porn. These are the people who routinely obsess about Fox News now convincing their audience that a coup is afoot. Only a few weeks ago they were blasting Fox for talking about a deep state coup and now they really believe one is happening.
If we want a sane country, we need a sane media. The hysterics in the press need to calm down and maybe take a break.
Count every legal vote. Allow the President to investigate and make challenges. There’s no need to rush. There are dates certain in the election process and we’re still more than a month out from the first big one — the Electoral College meeting.
Everyone needs to calm down.
The more I think about it the more I think the media is responsible for the state of our country. People want information and knowledge, and that's what they think they are getting. But clearly there is some serious brainwashing going on and our population seems to be controlled by media & social media hacks..
Erick, You often seem to sit in the middle of two raging mobs. For the record, I agree with most of your views about possibly flipping this election just like I agree with most of your views about the danger of Covid and the fundamentals of Biblical Christianity. A few things you might consider adding to your election viewpoint without compromising your basic views are:
1) Making a clear statement that denying Republican observers reasonable access to the vote counting was something that needs to change. I have seen the photos of observers kept 100 (or more) feet away from the vote counters. with binoculars. That is simply not right and the people in charge of voting centers that denied legal access should face some consequences, even if it doesn't alter the certification of election results.
2) States need to clean up their voter rolls and they clearly contain deceased people and other people who do not have the right to vote. My PA election supervisor says my absentee ballot was counted, but an official PA government website designed to tell me whether my absentee vote was counted returns the message "We are not able to match your information with our records." That and other issues (such as validating which ballots are legal/illegal) give those of us in PA a lot of reasons to be skeptical that this was a fair election.
3) There are three states with 37 electoral votes that are under 1% margins (WI, GA, AZ) that together have about a 48K difference (less than the 70K difference for WI, MI, PA in 2006 that you repeatedly referenced as rather trivial - which it is). If one assumes NC is Trump's (as Decision Desk has called his 75K margin safe), as is Alaska, then Trump would have 269 electoral votes, and an EC-tie, even without flipping PA. If Trump was also able to flip the 5 votes of NV's 37K margin, he would win and I think their is reasonable evidence that NV is a state potentially subject to voter fraud with lots of allegations that need investigated.
4. Your posts about the high hurdle of proor it takes to overturn an election are great. But instead of focusing on Michigan's margin of 148K votes as one of your recent posts did, you might want to focus on the states more likely to flip because of smaller margins. If you did that it might keep people from laboring you as a "surrendercrat NeverTrumper" as your tweet from yesterday suggested.
5. A good reason for investigating the fraud allegations is that this shouldn't be an issue in US elections and it shouldn't take over a week to count votes. This is true, even if Trump can't prove enough fraud to flip states (which isn't the same as proof that there isn't enough fraud to flip states, given the time limit and the Democrats/Courts ability to stall investigations). The Democrats have consistently fought against measures that would increase our election integrity. Perhaps you can support instituting measures like those used in EU countries which require voters to obtain a unique voter-id-number for a voting precinct mailed to their one and only official address. I know for a fact that this is done in Germany and even though I have a German residency permit, I am not entitled to vote and I cannot vote. The failure to do this in America opens the door to a massive amount of potential fraud that would be nearly impossible to prove the extent of even if it does exist.