Yeah, I've been quiet lately. Been spending more of my time in prayer, which is more useful than anything else I'm in a position to do. When I write this, things are still up in the air, but the "president-elect" theater is so thick on the ground you'd think it was an official thing and not just "the guy who looks like he will get most of the electoral votes in December, assuming a normal election." But I think a few observations need to be made.
Whichever outcome you think is best, there are some concerns about how we've gotten to where we are, and where we seem to be headed.
Until now, only third-world dictatorships have stopped ballot counts partway through and then either flat-out declared a winner or made a show of resuming counts with suddenly overwhelming democratic support. Now it's happened here. Will it ever be otherwise in the future?
The Dems told us their game plan. They tried to soften up our resolve with predictions of a "red mirage," which sounded like wishful thinking until they started using the phrase "by any means necessary." Considering things now look shady, apparently that wasn't hyperbole.
And yes, whether you like the putative outcome or not, this is sketchy. We gave Gore the opportunity for recounts twenty years ago, and all he did was demand re-recounts in traditionally Democrat districts hoping to squeeze out more (D) votes, but every time it went further against him. And also he tried to stop military ballots from being counted due to a discrepancy in absentee voter laws, knowing that those votes go predominantly (R).
But not only did the red mirage seem to happen, not a single late-counted mail-in ballot went to Trump. Not one protest vote, not one crank, not one error, not one ambiguous ballot; and not one with down-ticket votes. We happen to know already that Democrats don't comprise the entirety of mail-in voters, so where did the Republican voters go? And why did Trump do better than Hillary in every state except for the ones that stopped counting around 11 pm and resumed after they found enough ballots to reverse Trump's lead? States, I might add, that are swing states headed by Democrat leadership--or at least, were headed by Democrats.
Even if everything is above board--I'm sure a few things will shake out in unexpected ways, but assuming everything we suspect now is righteous--why are they acting like they have something to hide? Judges are throwing out requests for hearings to present evidence on the grounds that they weren't provided the evidence in advance. Georgia is destroying ballots even though state law requires they be kept for 22 months. The media are telling us it's over and there's no news to cover regarding the recounts and lawsuits. The recounts in 2000 were so belabored that by day 37 everyone was tired of the uncertainty and a lot of Gore voters were willing to concede if Gore would just stop being an ass about it. Now all we're hearing is "dolphins still missing, nothing to report."
I still hold out some hope that we're finally going to wise up about election security and fraud minimization. People who say voter fraud is better than voter suppression either don't understand that those are morally the same thing, or they're lying because historically voter fraud as a specific thing has gone their way and voter suppression as a specific thing has not gone their way. But if the KKK had diluted legitimate votes in predominantly black precincts with thousands of fake ballots instead of just scaring them away on election day, those "any type of security is still racist even when I run out of reasonable arguments against protections that have been known to work elsewhere in the world, so you still can't do it" folks would be a lot more circumspect about how to balance the one species of procedural corruption against the other.
And that's all it is. Being able go into a booth and pull a lever or darken a bubble isn't some magic invocation of human rights. Being able to participate in the process at all, and legitimately, is.
