In any case: universal suffrage on the scale of the US population, combined with the reach of mass media and facebook-assisted individually targeted advertising, adds up to antipopular despotism. The hazard of enfranchising vast herds of stupid adults isn't well-intentioned poor decision-making, but easily manipulated decision-making. That the source of disillusionment with our system is, for many, a perception of procedural fraud rather than its failure to serve the people, itself further serves the regime, as a distraction and as a charge which is answerable with promises of reform.
Electoral procedure can be reformed, but there is no solution to the ever-increasing ability of the powerful to manipulate the stupid. Right now, someone is probably shoving Facebook data into an algorithm that can turn the midterms on ads and reordered search results: what is "election fraud" then?
Democratic government may not "work," but it probably works better than anything else, and we in the US did have a functional one: before suffrage was expanded to men who neither own property nor pay taxes. As is true of the Romans, America's founding by miraculously capable early generations provides for an excruciatingly shallow decline, contra the instantaneously-combusting South American first attempt at democracy.
And for whom does democracy not work? Sociobiology cannot be forgotten; even if they become literate, I wouldn't expect any Pygmy to draw up a republican constitution any time soon.
I only wish your analysis helped. As you note something on such a scale would require considerable organization. So we see that https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ by Molly Ball. In that article the legal changes assisted in how ballots were used. Such an effort took a lot of money and effort. Getting the cooperation of the Chamber and the AFL/CIO was quite an accomplishment. So businesses were somewhat coerced into cooperation by the implied protest threats. And then the election observers were limited by more coercive threats to election officials. Nor much of a stretch to imagine the Time election group seeing 538 maps and creating enough ballots to gain an advantage exactly where the advantage was needed. Money and organization were obviously in place. So I can't just let those facts go away.
In contrast, if we examine that no defense was mounted against changes in the election rules, we see a political party not particularly interested in re-election of their own President. Observers not allowed to observe should have had US Marshals on stand-by to require adequate surveillance. Counting should not have preceded without observers. Perhaps the scale of the effort was unknown to the Republicans but that remains unclear as well. Perhaps the Republicans are, in fact, that clueless.
At any rate, Mr Biden played rope-a-dope well. Mr Obama has managed to hold his team together, at least until the next election. Everybody understands that turning the DC huge morass is a terribly slow process. But the election has left a bad taste behind that the public is not particularly happy about, at least the part who even care about politics.
I think that group probably did quite a bit to sway the election, and may have in fact changed the outcome via the modes outlined in Time. Personally, I think looking at exit polling the #1 issue for the older demographic was Covid, and holding back the vaccine announcement until the votes were counted probably did more to sway the election than another single factor. If I were Trump I would have probably pointed that out a week before election day. "We have a vaccine, they're going to approve it the day after I get elected and they're holding it up (and potentially killing people) to manipulate votes" would have been, by my read, an accurate statement.
But I stand by my analysis that there's no way a group as dysfunctional as the D party could have stuffed the million plus ballots necessary to kink the election.
They didn't need to stuff ballots on election day. They needed a massive ballot-harvesting campaign that went on all summer and fall, paying people who otherwise would never have voted to request absentee ballots and then turn them over blank to the harvesters, who would fill them in for Dems. This would have to have happened all over the country, not just the places where they were afraid they might lose because - as you said - they couldn't be sure where they would need the votes. It would have required massive changes in what were expected to be key states, dramatically expanding availability of absentee ballots, placing anonymous dropboxes all over (so ballots could be dumped en masse without suspicion), removing signature verification requirements, and legalizing ballot harvesting. They would have needed massive infusions of cash, and a pretext for the absentee ballot expansion. And even then, the Trump voter turnout was so massive on election day that they would have had to hit pause before finishing the count to see if they needed any last-minute help to get over the top, fabricating ludicrous excuses to justify it.
And not one of the people who were paid by this massive conspiracy has come forward? The hardest thing to believe about a hypothesis like this is that hundreds of thousands of patsies, grifters and useful idiots would keep their mouths shut.
You don't have to pay true believers. The idea that a "conspiracy" is needed is silly. Strip away the safeguards, convince people that one candidate is Hitler, the fraud happens on its own. The aspects that required conspiracy are the withholding of the news of an approved vaccine until after the election and the teamwork of the media, tech companies and intelligence operatives covering for Biden (the Hunter laptop being "Russian Disinformation", covering up the influence peddling scheme of the Bidens..., covering for his obvious mental decline...). The conspiracy items have come out as fact. The FBI told Facebook what to ban. Twitter shut down the NY Post's account. The former head of the CIA acknowledged they knew the laptop was real, but that kicking Trump out of the WH was worth a little lie. Cheat as hard as you can, on every playing field available, all the time. You can still lose elections when you cheat, but there is no such thing as winning by too much. The notion that knowledge of how many votes will be cast is required to engage in cheating is childish. If the cheating had resulted in a mirror of Reagan's 1984 win, would the Democrats think they cheated too hard? No. They would correctly realize that they had demoralized their opponents to the extent that they would win the next couple of elections with momentum. Had Ross Perot not run in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore would have been forgotten already.
The author's contention that the D party is too dysfunctional to centrally plan ballot fraud is completely accurate. The notion that the CIA is up to the challenge is only slightly more realistic. Had they run a centralized ballot fraud scheme, they would get caught after success because there would be those in the organization that would disagree with the effort.
In any case: universal suffrage on the scale of the US population, combined with the reach of mass media and facebook-assisted individually targeted advertising, adds up to antipopular despotism. The hazard of enfranchising vast herds of stupid adults isn't well-intentioned poor decision-making, but easily manipulated decision-making. That the source of disillusionment with our system is, for many, a perception of procedural fraud rather than its failure to serve the people, itself further serves the regime, as a distraction and as a charge which is answerable with promises of reform.
Electoral procedure can be reformed, but there is no solution to the ever-increasing ability of the powerful to manipulate the stupid. Right now, someone is probably shoving Facebook data into an algorithm that can turn the midterms on ads and reordered search results: what is "election fraud" then?
That's a long way if just saying "democracy doesn't work," to which I totally agree. And we probably never had a democracy to begin with.
Democratic government may not "work," but it probably works better than anything else, and we in the US did have a functional one: before suffrage was expanded to men who neither own property nor pay taxes. As is true of the Romans, America's founding by miraculously capable early generations provides for an excruciatingly shallow decline, contra the instantaneously-combusting South American first attempt at democracy.
And for whom does democracy not work? Sociobiology cannot be forgotten; even if they become literate, I wouldn't expect any Pygmy to draw up a republican constitution any time soon.
The main feature of our current oligarchic system is that they myth of democracy suppresses armed revolt by the peasants.
more:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-purge-will-end-in-violence
I only wish your analysis helped. As you note something on such a scale would require considerable organization. So we see that https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ by Molly Ball. In that article the legal changes assisted in how ballots were used. Such an effort took a lot of money and effort. Getting the cooperation of the Chamber and the AFL/CIO was quite an accomplishment. So businesses were somewhat coerced into cooperation by the implied protest threats. And then the election observers were limited by more coercive threats to election officials. Nor much of a stretch to imagine the Time election group seeing 538 maps and creating enough ballots to gain an advantage exactly where the advantage was needed. Money and organization were obviously in place. So I can't just let those facts go away.
In contrast, if we examine that no defense was mounted against changes in the election rules, we see a political party not particularly interested in re-election of their own President. Observers not allowed to observe should have had US Marshals on stand-by to require adequate surveillance. Counting should not have preceded without observers. Perhaps the scale of the effort was unknown to the Republicans but that remains unclear as well. Perhaps the Republicans are, in fact, that clueless.
At any rate, Mr Biden played rope-a-dope well. Mr Obama has managed to hold his team together, at least until the next election. Everybody understands that turning the DC huge morass is a terribly slow process. But the election has left a bad taste behind that the public is not particularly happy about, at least the part who even care about politics.
I think that group probably did quite a bit to sway the election, and may have in fact changed the outcome via the modes outlined in Time. Personally, I think looking at exit polling the #1 issue for the older demographic was Covid, and holding back the vaccine announcement until the votes were counted probably did more to sway the election than another single factor. If I were Trump I would have probably pointed that out a week before election day. "We have a vaccine, they're going to approve it the day after I get elected and they're holding it up (and potentially killing people) to manipulate votes" would have been, by my read, an accurate statement.
But I stand by my analysis that there's no way a group as dysfunctional as the D party could have stuffed the million plus ballots necessary to kink the election.
They didn't need to stuff ballots on election day. They needed a massive ballot-harvesting campaign that went on all summer and fall, paying people who otherwise would never have voted to request absentee ballots and then turn them over blank to the harvesters, who would fill them in for Dems. This would have to have happened all over the country, not just the places where they were afraid they might lose because - as you said - they couldn't be sure where they would need the votes. It would have required massive changes in what were expected to be key states, dramatically expanding availability of absentee ballots, placing anonymous dropboxes all over (so ballots could be dumped en masse without suspicion), removing signature verification requirements, and legalizing ballot harvesting. They would have needed massive infusions of cash, and a pretext for the absentee ballot expansion. And even then, the Trump voter turnout was so massive on election day that they would have had to hit pause before finishing the count to see if they needed any last-minute help to get over the top, fabricating ludicrous excuses to justify it.
It's a good thing none of that happened.
And not one of the people who were paid by this massive conspiracy has come forward? The hardest thing to believe about a hypothesis like this is that hundreds of thousands of patsies, grifters and useful idiots would keep their mouths shut.
You don't have to pay true believers. The idea that a "conspiracy" is needed is silly. Strip away the safeguards, convince people that one candidate is Hitler, the fraud happens on its own. The aspects that required conspiracy are the withholding of the news of an approved vaccine until after the election and the teamwork of the media, tech companies and intelligence operatives covering for Biden (the Hunter laptop being "Russian Disinformation", covering up the influence peddling scheme of the Bidens..., covering for his obvious mental decline...). The conspiracy items have come out as fact. The FBI told Facebook what to ban. Twitter shut down the NY Post's account. The former head of the CIA acknowledged they knew the laptop was real, but that kicking Trump out of the WH was worth a little lie. Cheat as hard as you can, on every playing field available, all the time. You can still lose elections when you cheat, but there is no such thing as winning by too much. The notion that knowledge of how many votes will be cast is required to engage in cheating is childish. If the cheating had resulted in a mirror of Reagan's 1984 win, would the Democrats think they cheated too hard? No. They would correctly realize that they had demoralized their opponents to the extent that they would win the next couple of elections with momentum. Had Ross Perot not run in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore would have been forgotten already.
The author's contention that the D party is too dysfunctional to centrally plan ballot fraud is completely accurate. The notion that the CIA is up to the challenge is only slightly more realistic. Had they run a centralized ballot fraud scheme, they would get caught after success because there would be those in the organization that would disagree with the effort.