By any means necessary

As long as my side wins, 'nkay?

The local, free weekly is back to two full pages in the ‘opinion section’, which is simply a collection of letters to the editor. Once again they must be printing every rant that comes in. I’m going to join in the fray and submit a piece. We’ll see if they print it next week but meanwhile you lucky subscribers get an advanced copy here.

The latest hot issue is election integrity. On one side, those who want hand counts and in-person voting, and on the other, people who think the way it’s set up is fine and dandy. You can guess where the tin-foil Bircher crowd and the Paint-our-crosswalks rainbow! crowd stand on this one by just asking the following:

-Are you happy that Trump lost?

-Yes!

And you’re done, because that two-line dialogue implies the next one:

-Then the election was fair, right?

-Absolutely!

Of course if Trump wins the next election, the MAGA hats will see it as fair and the purple-hairs will be certain there was tampering. The distrust and bickering will continue no matter who wins. (In my opinion, the establishment will get what they want either way* but that’s not the gist of this article.)

Am I being too hard on the electorate? Surely we all want fair elections, right? Well, here is what Mr. Brilliant-Atheist, Sam Harris said about the role of the media in the last election:

“Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared,” Harris said.

“Whatever the scope of what Joe Biden’s corruption is – we can just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he’s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine or wherever else, or China – it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun,” Harris said on the podcast. “It doesn’t even stack up against Trump University.

“Trump University, as a story, is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden’s laptop in my view,” he said.

“Now that doesn’t answer the people who say it’s still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account like that…but I think it was warranted,” Harris argued.

Do you think Sam Harris cares about whether there were election irregularities in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, etc.? Does he want to sit and listen to a Trump supporter detail to him him exactly how the election was stolen? He doesn’t care about that stuff, as long as Orange Man is defeated.

And neither do the folks who are so resistant to the idea of honest, verifiable, hand-counted-ballot elections. They suffer TDS and that’s what guides and infects their thinking.

So I stand with those who are lobbying for hand-count, in-person voting.

Here is my short, upcoming letter to the Bitterroot Sun.

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Regarding the raging debate on hand-count ballots: “Experts agree that these machines are insecure because they record votes electronically and could either be manipulated or malfunction without detection. They can't truly be audited and they leave room for some doubt in the result.  "[We need] paper ballots 100percent ... This isn't hard, this isn't controversial. As scientists, we know exactly what we need," Schneier said. 

Where in the dark corners of the web did I unearth that piece of tin-foil hattery? Breitbart? Newsmax? Infowars? The JBS website?

Nope, that was in an article before the 2020 election, from NPR, that bastion of reactionary-right thinking. 

See, it’s not just the MAGA crowd that have voiced distrust in the system. Let us remember that concerns about electronic voting go way back, coming from both sides of the aisle. Moving forward, why shouldn’t we aim for simplicity and trust in the voting system? What exactly makes hand counts and in-person voting worse than what we have now?

From a 2022 AP article: 

French voters in Sunday’s presidential election will use the same system that’s been used for generations: paper ballots that are cast in person and counted by hand. Despite periodic calls for more flexibility or modernization, France doesn’t do mail-in voting, early voting or use voting machines en masse like the United States...Mail-in voting was banned in 1975 amid fears of potential fraud...Machine-voting was allowed as an experiment starting in 2002, but the purchase of new machines has been frozen since 2008 due to security concerns. Only a few dozen towns still use them.

Even if you’re convinced that the 2020 election was "the most secure in American history", why wouldn’t you want a system that left less room for distrust and controversy, post election? Why can’t we do the same as France and other hand-count nations? Who knows, with clean elections we may even be able to elect someone outside of the red/blue factions of the uniparty!

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* “The only way i could see the US 2024 election being a "win" is if a significant amt of Americans wake up to the fact that the govt and both political parties are organized crime and do not even try to represent the public. They don't even try to hide it now.” - Whitney Webb