As I have said lo, these many years, when Republicans win elections, they have to win beyond the Margin of Lawyer. Otherwise, regardless of who won on Election Day, the Democrat always wins on Post-Election Day, because mysteriously all the missing ballot boxes found in dumpsters and recycling bins and the trunks of Democrat cars contain virtually no Republican votes. Alas, in the Sunshine State of Florida, the GOP's gubernatorial and senatorial candidates failed to win beyond the Margin of Lawyer, and as a result we're all discovering, two decades on, that the same institutional corruption that put US electoral integrity on a par with the Congo is still there, entirely unspoiled by progress. Everything else in the world has been transformed beyond recognition - newspapers, telephones, Bruce Jenner - but the Florida chadlands have been lovingly preserved as a wacky Recount theme park.
With that in mind here are a few moments from my various November/December 2000 columns in the Telegraph, Speccie, National Post and elsewhere from those unforgettable weeks after Al Gore, as this guy Gillum is now doing in the Governor's race, de-conceded:
The early hours of Wednesday, Nov 8:
Bush: "So you're retracting your concession?"
Gore: "You don't have to get snippy."
George Dubya Bush has now explicitly addressed the issue of his "snippiness". He told CBS this week: "We don't use that word too often down here in Texas, so I'm not exactly sure what that means." Ha! You may not hear "snippy" in the high-falutin' Social Register society whirl of Waco, Governor, but down on Al's "farm" in Tennessee they use it a lot.
"Snippy" is what snotty people say when they find someone snotty.
And so it began, as a once proud people suddenly found themselves plunged into the mystical Land of Chads. November 17th 2000:
Welcome back to Campaign 2000 Election Update: America's Day Of Indecision - Day 11. The show ain't over till the Four Chads have sung, and few vocal groups are as popular with Democrats as this quartet. There's Dimpled Chad, Swinging Chad, Pregnant Chad and Hanging Chad. There's also Flat Chad, but, for obvious reasons, he doesn't get to sing with the group - so far, anyway.
If you want to catch the Chads for yourself, check the Butterfly Ballot - that's not a Florida nightclub but Palm Beach County's now famous voting form, on which the chads are the little bits of paper you punch out next to your preferred candidate's name. Sadly, when you let the ballots get counted mechanically, the machines tend to display their extreme Republican bias by failing to discover enough additional votes for the Vice-President. So the massed ranks of Gore lawyers have been banking on the folks counting by hand to divine the voting intentions of Palm Beach citizens too weak to punch out the chad.
For example, if you see a Hanging Chad - that's a chad clinging to the ballot by just one corner - that might be a vote for Gore. So might a Swinging Chad - a chad affixed by two corners. However, let's not forget the Pregnant Chad, a chad still firmly in the ballot but with a visible bulge, and the Dimpled Chad, also firmly in but with a vaguely discernible indentation. Previously in Florida hand counts, the Pregnant and Dimpled Chads have not been regarded as proper grounds for a recorded vote. Still, the Palm Beach Election Canvassing Commission, after relaxing its criteria a quarter of the way through the first manual recount, had been discovering legions of hitherto unknown Hangers and Swingers for Gore.
Observers at the count report that, by the time the ballots have been manhandled by Democrat Carol Roberts and her cohorts, some hitherto Swinging Chads have become Hanging Chads and some Pregnant Chads have become Swingers. Even these generous interpretations failed to uncover enough Gore voters to put him in the White House.
Which means it's time for the lawyers. Democracy in action: One man, one vote, one recount, one suit, one ex parte motion, one interlocutory appeal...
So, on Tuesday, Democrats sued to get Pregnant and Dimpled Chads included as votes for Gore, and on Wednesday Judge Jorge Labarga ruled that Preggers and Dimply could be counted. Of course, in holding up a ballot to determine its status, you might take a perfectly smooth Flat Chad, one with no discernible indentation, and accidentally Dimple it. Whether even this would produce enough votes for Gore is unclear.
The courts seem to have accepted the principle that Democrats have particular difficulty voting, and that not to allow party officials to identify voter intent retrospectively is, ipso facto, discriminatory. According to "California's premier expert on hand counts", Jack Davis: "The voting profile shows clearly that Democrats are more likely to screw up the chad than Republicans. This goes across the board by at least one per cent." So, if the Bush team objects to hand counts, it might be easiest just to increase Gore's vote in any chad-minded county by one per cent.
If that's not enough, we need seriously to consider whether the Flat Chads - ballots with no mark on them whatsoever - are not, in fact, Gore votes. After all, there may be thousands of voters in Palm Beach too feeble-minded even to be aware that they are actually Gore supporters.
Come to that, it seems likely that the millions of Floridians who didn't vote at all are also Gore supporters who were just delayed at the shuffleboard court. Why should they be disfranchised? So we are not in Florida or Kansas any more: we are in Chad. Al's come out Swinging; Dubya is Hanging at his ranch; Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State, is cutely Dimpled; and the air is Pregnant with excitement. On Wednesday, Ms Harris told the errant hand-counting Gore counties to take their chads and shove 'em, and certified the votes as they stood. Gore's job now is simply to tie the certification up in court so that, when the Electoral College votes in December, Florida won't be represented and he'll win a majority of those there.
As the pressure to produce a valid ballot has gradually lessened - from Hanging to Dimpled - so the pressure on the electoral process has been ratcheted up. Even in this week's statement offering "finality", Gore couldn't resist putting a tighter squeeze on Democratic officials. "We should complete hand counts already begun in Palm Beach County, Dade County and Broward County," he declared, not to count the votes but rather to "determine the true intentions" of voters. Yet heavily Democratic Dade voted not to recount, and is now being sued by Gore to force it to do so. Florida voters may not know how to punch properly, but Al and his lawyers do.
I'll say. Meanwhile, the Democrats get to take voting machines home with them. From The Sunday Telegraph on November 19th:
Meanwhile, Democratic State Representative Irving Slosberg was stopped by police and found to have a Palm Beach County "Votamatic" ballot-punching machine in his car. "I asked Mr Slosberg to return it to me," said Denise Cote, director of public affairs, "and he said No, he intended to use it." That's the spirit, Irv!
And let's not forget Broward County, where the manual "recount" is proceeding amid a mountain of fallen chads on the floor. The chad is the little bit of paper next to the candidate's name that gets punched out when you put the ballot in the Votamatic. In other words, if you're just counting existing ballots, there shouldn't be any chads on the counting-room floor.
But, whether by accident or design, the little fellers keep detaching themselves from the ballot, thereby creating more and more new votes. Initially, Broward County's Canvassing Board voted not to "recount", but Al prevailed on Judge Robert Lee, the recalcitrant Democrat who'd cast the deciding vote, to come to his senses. Likewise with another Dem stronghold, Dade County, which on Friday knuckled under and agreed to "recount". And now that the absentee ballots have been tallied,Al has the advantage of knowing precisely how many hitherto undiscovered "votes" his operatives need to find.
And, if Katherine Harris refuses to be steamrollered, the Dems are already looking down the road. On Friday, Warren Christopher, the former Secretary of State to Bill Clinton and now mob lawyer to Chicago Al, announced that, regardless of how the Florida Supreme Court ruled, if the final count was certified on Saturday and Bush declared the winner, the Vice-President would still not concede. Nothing, it seems, can stop Gore - not the count, not the recount, not the certification, the electoral college, the inauguration, not Hillary doing her first exploratory "listening tour" of Iowa, not the 2004 New Hampshire primary . . . Al is prepared to count and sue and sue and count and counter-sue and sewer-count for as long as it takes to become the first Leader of the Free World from a banana republic.
The lesson of the Clinton Presidency is that, for Republicans, the other shoe never drops. Were Chicago Al to steal enough votes, in three months' time his cheerleaders in the media would be saying that though he came to the Presidency in "difficult circumstances" - ie, losing the election - he's made great efforts to unite the country, stymied only by "strident", "mean-spirited", "partisan" Republicans. This post-election period has been, according to the pious network anchors, a "civics lesson", but it would be more accurate to call it a masterclass in Chicago style. Two years ago, worldly Dems told us not to worry: the corruption was confined strictly to oral sex, and, sophisticated chaps that we are, we could all understand that, couldn't we? Now, with hindsight, it seems more like a useful dry run for a more ambitious project.
Thanksgiving came and went, with little to give thanks for if you were looking for deliverance from Florida election certifiers:
On Wednesday, Dick Cheney suffered a mild heart attack and had a stent inserted in his artery. I've no idea what a "stent" is but it makes a change from "chad".
Al Gore spent the holiday surrounded by his loved ones - that's to say, his ingenious legal team, who tried to keep him up to speed on the status of their various lawsuits. On Tuesday, for example, they were very pleased with the Florida Supreme Court ruling. But, by Wednesday, they were back in court suing Dade County for, er, complying with it.
Dade's Democrat-controlled canvassing board had more than 600,000 ballots to recount by hand and figured there was no way it could do it by the new Sunday deadline, especially with the biggest holiday of the year in the middle, so it voted to shove the manual recount and certify the (if you can follow this) original recount before the harassed counters all wound up in the bed next to Dick Cheney having dimpled chads removed from their arteries.
As someone "devoted" to "public service", Gore seemed bewildered to discover there were government workers whose idea of a happy Thanksgiving didn't involve bobbing for Democrat votes among the fallen chads. So the Vice-President returned to the Florida Supreme Court to sue Dade into resuming its recount.
Stick to your guns, Dade! Stick to 'em like pregnant chads to a butterfly ballot! Why bust a gut for a bunch of shysters who won't even be grateful long enough to wangle you a couple of invites to the inaugural ball?
If Gore had just named the number of votes he needed, maybe they'd have opened up the stationery cupboard, and dimpled 'em there and then. But, after two weeks, the small signs of increasing grumpiness from low-level Democrat county officials is very encouraging - notwithstanding that in two Florida counties (Palm Beach and Broward) you no longer have the right to cast your vote, only the right to have your vote "interpreted" by Vote Interpretationists who are solemnly sworn to divine your true "intention".
Al may be the Western world's lousiest election campaigner, but he has been a brilliant post-election campaigner. Who else could have got a state court to overthrow its own election law on no grounds whatsoever? No evidence of voter fraud, mechanical failure, nothing but Gore's own raw hunger for "chads". If nothing else, the desperate man who launched this insane coup-by-chad has demonstrated how vulnerable the levers of the state are. Even if he is cast into oblivion, the monstrous precedents he has established will loom over this republic for years.
And so, yet again, they have. November 26th:
In the chadlands of Florida, glassy-eyed Democrat officials work their way through the pile and hold their ballots up to the light in search of the dimpled chad: Gore. Gore. Gore. Invalid. Gore. Gore. Buchanan. Gore. Bush . . . Whoops, sorry, that was my corned beef on rye.
The Vice-President has been stacking up more dimples than a convention of Kirk Douglas impersonators. But will they be enough? At 5pm today, when the final numbers are submitted to the Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, Al Gore's Great Election Heist getaway car comes to a fork in the road. If the mountain of dimples, pimples, pustules, cysts and other blemishes invisible to the naked eye has pushed Al past Dubya by three votes, look for the Gore campaign to drop talk of "patience" and "letting the process play out" for words like "finality" and "the American people are looking for closure" and "it's time to move on". On the other chad, if Al is still behind, the "patience/ process" line will be good for a couple more weeks, months, whatever.
On my local television station, the latest update was followed by the reassuringly familiar commercial for personal-injury lawyers Welch, Graham and Manby - "where winning is no accident". That's the spirit! In Palm Beach County, the Gore campaign is planning to sue the Democrat canvassing board for counting only dimpled chads on ballots where all the chads are dimpled, and excluding ballots where the Senator's, Probate Judge's, County Commissioner's and Dogcatcher's chads are punched through and only Al's is dimpled. In Dade County, they've asked the Civil Rights Division of Janet Reno's Federal Justice Department to investigate whether Republican-orchestrated "mobs" intimidated the canvassing board into abandoning their recount. (I do hope so: why should Jesse Jackson the Rhyming Reverend and his Rented Ranters have the streets to themselves?) In Tallahassee, a Gore suit to force Dade to start recounting again was turned down by the Florida Supreme Court unanimously - though Al's lawyers are considering demanding a manual recount of the judges. In West Palm Beach, a party of Gore aides went into a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner but ordered the meatloaf instead of the turkey because they were "confused" by a "badly designed" menu.
Most of us expert analysts have only a hazy idea of what the Gore guys are on about. Just a few weeks back, if you'd heard on the news that the Vice-President's suit had been thrown out, it would have meant that he'd gone back to the earth-toned leisurewear Naomi Wolf recommended a couple of campaign re-launches back. Now when you talk to people in the Gore camp they say things like: "Well, the Vice-President has filed his briefs asking for emergency relief following Katherine Harris's refusal to submit his hanging chad to a hand count." How long he can keep this up is a question Democrats are, belatedly, beginning to ponder. Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist and Gore supporter, now says, "If I could, I would withdraw my vote." The New York Post's Andrea Peyser says, "I want to change my vote to Bush."
When you've lost the count, and the recount, and the recount of the recount, and the augmented recounts with the hanging and swinging and pregnant and dimpled chads, when even the most gerrymandered counting methods are unable to concoct enough votes, everyone else starts to grasp that even the greatest institutions are, in the end, as vulnerable as the Wizard of Oz: you pull back the curtain and there's just some ramshackle contraption being operated by the likes of Carol Roberts, the Palm Beach official who declared she's willing to go to jail for Al Gore. Bagehot's line about not letting daylight in on the mystery applies not just to monarchy but to all political systems, and no one who had any genuine respect for the Presidency would be going into court to argue the merits of the solitary dimpled chad on otherwise undimpled ballots.
But even Democrat judges were losing patience:
"We conclude as a matter of law that the Palm Beach County ballot does not constitute substantial non-compliance with the statutory requirements. Accordingly, we affirm the trial court's dismissal with prejudice of the complaints," declared Florida court spokesman Craig Waters. "Thank you. I believe we are done for the night."
Snippy, snippy, snippy.
Well, there's still the wild card. Seminole and Martin Counties. Seems some computer crashed and Republican officials had to write identification numbers on the absentee-ballot envelopes by hand. Not on the ballots, just on the envelopes.
And not on all the envelopes, just some. But Democrats think they're in with a shot at getting all the absentee ballots thrown out...
It was eighteen years ago that Florida's election systems were revealed to the world as both farcical and corrupt. But here we again, with nothing changed. Because apparently Floridians - or, at any rate, their political class, like it that way.
~Steyn will be back later today with Mark at the Movies, and, for members of The Mark Steyn Club, Part Two of our brand new audio adventure in Tales for Our Time: The Scarlet Pimpernel. He'll also have some special features for tomorrow's centenary of the Armistice. You can find more details about The Mark Steyn Club here. And stay tuned for details of the second Steyn Club Cruise with Mark and his special guests.
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Brenda Snipes and her merry crew of corrupt election officials in Broward county, Fla. should come to Arizona and learn how "The Art of the Steal" is done by the grand masters of the art, the AZ Democratic Party. When I hit the sack in the wee hours Wed. Nov 7th Martha McSally was clinging to a narrow 35,000 vote margin in a shockingly close race. It was reported nationally that 99% were tallied in AZ. Now I'm more than a fair hand at mathematics so with about 2.1 millions votes cast with presumably 1% uncounted even if Sinema won all of these votes she'd fall just short. Not so fast Royboy! Turns out there were some 600,000 votes that were apparently tallied but not verified! Most from the two Democratic strongholds of Maricopa and Pima counties. Apparently AZ electoral math is a previously unknown branch of mathematics. Anyway, signatures on early voted ballots must be verified before being added to the 'official' totals. What has happened is that with the lone exception of the Governor's race, (too large a margin to steal) every close election both on the state and national level that the GOP was narrowly ahead has flipped, including a fairly substantial GOP lead in the Attn. General race. Sinema will take Flake's republican senate seat and a Dem has won McSally's abandoned GOP congressional seat. We've been re-assured by our media that this is all on the up & up so stop complaining. Only in Arizona folks!
I moved to Palm Beach County four years ago. I now firmly believe if you can't draw a line between two points... a basic bit of geometry... your vote should not count. We no longer have the butterfly ballot and hanging chads. We have people who circle the candidate of choice rather than follow the instructions.
Places which were parts of the Warsaw Pact now have more robust voting standards than several components of the United States.
In the 1980s-1990s, I served as an election judge here in The Workers' Paradise of Austin. At that time, Austin used the exact same Stylus/PunchCard voting system that generated the famous "Hanging Chad" debacle in Florida in the 2000 elections.
In fact, it was Physically IMPOSSIBLE for a "properly-cast" (i.e., ONE (1)! Ballot placed in the voting machine and voted using the stylus) to generate any of the infamous "hanging chads", and especially the uncompleted "pregnant chads." THE ONLY WAY "Hanging Chads" was POSSIBLE was to align 4-5-6-7-8-10-12-20 "ballot cards" and attempt to poke a specific chad number through ALL of them at once with a stylus. NO Other Interpretation is Possible!
And now the CommieRATS are inventing a new "hanging chad" voter fraud. Time For SOMEONE(s) TO GO TO PRISON.
As a Broward County Republican, I am feeling very disenfranchised about now.
I (think I) recall that an Eastern Europe columnist, somewhere around the end of Obama's first term, opined that America could easily recover from whatever economic damage he was wreaking, but would not be able to recover from an electorate that would put him in the Presidency in the first place. Trump has made great strides in proving him right on the first claim, and this midterm election is pretty good proof that he was right on the second. Holding the Senate is only possible because there are more states with small but conservative populations, but the House is the true measure of the direction that the country's electorate is headed. Big, blue cities will soon irreversibly dominate the House, and ultimately the Electoral College. The Senate may be the last stand, but without drastic events or measures, it will ultimately succumb.
My modest proposal: Make election fraud a hanging offense.
Leftists try to de-legitimize and destroy every process or institution they do not currently control. Then, once they finally re-take control of them...voila, they're instantly legitimate again.
So when George W. Bush beat Gore in Florida, leftists tried to destroy the election result with a few tricks intended to deliver the state to Gore anyway. When that proved impossible, leftists tried to de-legitimize the election result and spent the rest of Bush's term screaming that "Bush stole the election".
The "de-legitmize and/or destroy" play is the same thing they've been using on Trump. They tried to destroy an election result ahead of time via treasonous conspiracy involving Obama, Clinton, Susan Rice, Brennan, Clapper, et al.
When that didn't work, they tried to destroy the election result after the fact by demanding impeachment on grounds of a false accusation which they themselves had concocted.
Simultaneously, they ran three other plays:
They attempted to de-legitimize the democratic institution of the electoral college (which cost them the election), in hopes of destroying it forever one day soon;
They attempted to de-legitimize Trump by smearing him as racist/sexist/misogynist/insane/dictatorial/whatever; and
They attempted to de-legitimize Trump via the Mueller investigation - which, by the way, is unconstitutional/unethical on at least three different grounds.
And now again, in Florida, it's the same thing: first try to destroy a non-leftist democratic outcome; if that works, declare victory. If it doesn't work, spend the next six years trying to de-legitimize the outcome (and by extension, democratic processes themselves) by accusing Republicans of "suppressing the vote" by deliberately miscounting the ballots during the re-count.
Leftists cannot be accommodated in any civilized society, because - as though by invincible compulsion - they seek to de-legitimize and destroy any process or institution they cannot control. Moreover, when they *do* come to control some process or institution, they end up destroying it anyway.
These Democrats do inspire one to march as a unit: I pledge allegiance to the Stamp of the Bunches of Come-On-In Americas. And to the Bananas for which it stands, one Plantation, under the Global Overlord, very Divisible, with Freebies (with restrictions) and Individual Not-yet-Discovered Identities for all.
Oh you losers over there in North America and Canada ( er apologies for the lumping) oughta get with the progressive program that we have here in Australia. When PM turdbull ( THE worst pm ever in the history or Australia) threw himself under a bus and got the boot, he threw his toys out of the cot and promptly absconded to his luxury apartment on central park. Thus creating a by election in the lush wealthy safe liberal seat of Wentworth. He didn't lift not one finger in helping Dave Sharma (a Jewish diplomat very bright) to get re elected. Even thought Sharma attracted some 18,000 primary votes, the independent a Lesbian doctor Karen Phelps attracted some 5000 primarily votes less. But thanks to proportional representation she picked up labours and others preferences thereby winning the seat, and leaving the incumbent PM with a hung parliament. On the night she won, she thanked her wife which left me very very confused as you can imagine.
Interestingly, after he said he was gone from political life and would not talk about what happened, the public broadcaster ( they adored him) gave him a special hour of QANDA allows on his own where audience members commiserated with him and I thought for a moment I was in Pyongyang and not Byron Bay which are very similar politically. You can watch it...on second thoughts, now don't. You'll just end up hating me. And I just want to be loved.
Oh did I mention that the labour plant who stood as an " independent" and fights for the rights of the poor and disposessed currently has a properly portfolios valued at AUS$18 million?
The sad part isn't that some dems are corrupt, but that half the country keeps voting for them. We're fortunate it's only half. So far. We're fortunate most of them aren't violent. So far.
Democrat hypocrisy is manifested in their endless cliches about "making every vote count" (twice, apparently) and "voter suppression".
Besides the legendary shenanigans in the JFK, LBJ(congressional), Franken and Gregoire "victories" there is another event that seems now to be completely forgotten, but should now be resurrected as a constant reminder of where the Democrats *really* stand on electoral integrity.
The Democrats have fought relentlessly behind the scenes to block military absentee ballots.
In late November, 2000, it became clear that Bush received nearly 65% of the military absentee ballots cast. Al Gore's massive legal team fought bitterly and valiantly to keep *every* military absentee ballot in Florida from being counted.
Here's an excerpt from "The Telegraph (UK)" from Nov. 20, 2000:
=============
THE painfully slow manual recount of Florida ballot papers took its most acrimonious turn yesterday when Republicans accused the Gore campaign of deliberately excluding servicemen's postal votes to fix the election.
Governor George W Bush comfortably won the overseas absentee vote by 1,380 votes to Vice-President Al Gore's 750 but, after vigorous challenges by Gore canvassers, 1,527 of the postal ballots, many of them from soldiers and sailors on active service, were rejected.
With the two candidates just 930 votes apart, every ballot paper counts and is being intensely fought over by Democratic and Republican party officials.
Gen Norman Schwarzkopf, the Gulf war commander who now lives in Florida, led Republican condemnation of a five-page guide which advised Democratic tellers how to raise objections to the postal votes.
He said: "It is a very sad day in our country when the men and women of the armed forces are serving abroad and facing danger of a daily basis . . . and are denied the right to vote for the president of the United States who will be their commander in chief."
Democratic tellers were advised to block ballots if there was no clearly legible postmark on the envelope, which is frequently the case when letters are posted from military bases. Normally, these ballots pass unchallenged.
Opinions are now hardening and many Republicans are seething at the Gore campaign's tactics.
Marc Racicot, the Republican Governor of Montana, said: "Last night we learned how far the Vice-President's campaign will go to win this election. And I am very sorry to say that the Vice-President's lawyers have gone to war in my judgment against the men and women who serve in our armed services."
==============
Along similar lines, I worked overseas and applied for an absentee ballot in the 1980 election. Unfortunately for me my US home was in Cook County, IL—always a den of Democrat corruption. Despite numerous attempts, I never received the ballot. Most likely because the Democrat voting authorities knew expatriate Americans tended to vote Republican.
One of the more farcical aspects of Gore's endless recount was Bill Daley whining about the horrible unfairness of punch card ballots. Those of us familiar with the cesspool of Chicago politics know that punch card ballots were introduced as being more foolproof than voting machines that were routinely rigged by the master ballot box stuffer Richard J. Daley, Bill's dad.
Entertaining and terrifying at the same time. Perhaps if Gore had won he'd have had less time to promote his cult and you might have had less uphill from Michael E Mann. When I go to vote at the Shrine of St Jude (patron saint of lost causes of course) in Tanners Street I find the soft pencil tied with string to the desk and the rustle of my paper ballot in the slot of the sealed box reassuring (I took my own pen for the Brexit vote just in case!) but sometimes wonder if there might be a more modern method. I'm grateful that we don't have chads to contend with at least. Our postal ballot system is a national scandal of course but it's usually only critical in areas that are pretty much lost already. Turning down Asia Bibi for asylum is yet another humiliation at the hands of May. If only we'd all been braver with the Satanic Verses as many have said.
I'll say it for Al, he was way more resourceful in defeat than Hillary. No "can you spare some change?" pity tours about what went wrong. No moping over the failed chad scam for him. In very short order he found an eminently consequential and lucrative calling on the marketing team for global warming and so didn't have to endure repeated rejections running for president. Hillary should swallow her pride and ask him for a job.
An amusing side note to the 2000 election, which I heard at the time from several People Who Would Know: Here in Duval County (essentially co-terminous with Jacksonville), which Bush carried, many thousands of ballots from heavily-black precincts in the northwestern part of town were invalidated and not counted. Local Democrats and black leaders were working themselves up to demand a recount when they realized what they would likely expose: The Sunday before the election, ministers in black churches, from the major AME institutions to the store-front world headquarters of a particular sect, all exhorted their congregation to remember to vote for Gore and Brown -- in this case, the now-incarcerated-for-corruption Congresswoman Corrine Brown, a popular local whose highly gerrymandered district meandered from Jacksonville west towards Tallahassee, but stopped short, turned south, and ensnared black populations down to Orlando. Well, such pulpit politicking has never been unusual in black churches (and seems to present no Constitutional difficulties for the ACLU), but there was an unforeseen difficulty: The presence on the ballot of Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne. Ballots list candidates by last name first, and it can be safely assumed that many a voter, recalling the minister's strident demand, carefully punched out not only Albert A. Gore's chad, but Harry Browne's as well, and by casting TWO votes for President, invalidated their vote and cast none, ensuring Bush would carry Duval and depriving Gore of thousands of votes that would have made him President without the carnival of chads in south Florida.
We have Harry Browne to thank for Gore's defeat.
My error: Candidates are listed by name in proper order: Al Gore and George W. Bush.
As someone said, the choice could be between ice cream and a kick to the head, and it would be 50.5% to 49.5% in Florida.
And yet the state capital still isn't "Tally Hassle".
Progress with voting processes and procedures? You're joking. We can sell and record 10's of millions lottery tickets in a day, instantly know where and when the winning ticket was sold and have zero errors doing it. We have facial recognition technology in major airports that can identify any of us. If we don't utilize 1st generation mechanical voting apparatuses, that's all the more difficult it is for local, Boss Hogg election commissioners on the banks of the swamp in West Undershirt County to "tabulate" the votes. C'mon Steyn! What are you? Some kind of pushy technocrat?
I think the dimples come from taking a stack of ballots and pounding a nail through them with a hammer. We should be sympathetic. It's very hard to get good, diligent craftsmanship from part-time, election-stealing labor.
I seem to recall, in much less detail, similar circumstances around Al Franken's election. Yes, the "found" ballots are always Democrat votes. Funny that.
As Rush Limbaugh points out, Democrats are always for minorities but not for rural voters.
And progressives are made more than 50% of white women voted for the Trump candidate in Texas but find it normal that almost 100% of black women voters went for the Democrat candidate (who is black).
You said it yourself in SteynPost #26: We're teaching the people a very troubling lesson. That elections make no difference, that the will of the people makes no difference. That lip service to pluralistic societies is all it is.
And I thought I'd add this link to something that I like. Many on the left would call it imperialistic propaganda but it's the truth. It's a speech from the show Dragnet. I hope someone watches it. It puts people into a better perspective of life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZo2hhvvlpw
Yep. Those patriarchal white men built a terrible, racist society that should be immediately torn down. /sarcsm
People do not recognize how good they have it, a wonderful life built on the shoulders of giants - regular people with true values and a solid work ethic.
Thanks for sharing this link.
Thanks. Soo much they see themselves as the David to our Goliath. I'd rather live off what the shoulders of giants rather than live at their feet. We live in a world of giants and men. Those who stand by the giants are more often left alone, those who stand against them are just waiting to be crushed by their feet. The giants are the ones with money, power, influence while we have to pick a side. They see themselves as being anti-giant but they follow the ones who have just as much if not more power than that they're against. The feeling of entitlement made me search for a quote and I found this one.
"Those that much covet are with gain so fond,
For what they have not, that which they possess
They scatter and unloose it from their bond,
And so, by hoping more, they have but less;
Or, gaining more, the profit of excess
Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,
That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain."
― William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece
The giants to whom I refer are not those who would crush people. I'm thinking of veterans mainly, but also people who worked hard to build a good life, a family, a community, and cared about the lives of others. To me, they are the giants. Not the ones with money, power and influence.
Apologies for the misinterpretation. We're straying away from hard work being rewarding because it sometimes is repetitive and unsatisfying so we search for the easiest way out. Relying on government is that way. When you live your life as a child and are given everything, it's hard not to want the rest of your life to end up the same way.
We can't allow the Dems to win in 2020 not that they care about results in the first place. They hate the way the elections are set up and would do away with them if they get into power. To them, the system is rigged against them. The laws of this country, our electorate, our process are all oppressive to them and they don't care about playing by any rule except the ones they make. We can't allow our country to end up like Europe. The left views itself in the way Islamic extremists do: They view any and all actions justified in their cause if we don't submit to their will. I don't want to see violence as a solution to ending this, no one on our side does, but if the next time someone happens to die because of them, should we stand by and take it? If we do, we'd be doing what they do when an illegal immigrant or a Muslim commits murder.