Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Gauging from the circus we are now witnessing in the Florida, election
workers, politicians and media clearly owe an apology to the lowly hanging chad
Both Democrats and Republicans have in the past blamed this poor
unfortunate chad the out the win of George W bush as president in 2000 – and the
attempt of Democrats to steal the election from him.
Tt was assumed back then, that this culprit – the hanging chad -- was
the source of all ill in the political system that allowed Bush to ascend to
the throne.
The Democrats, desperate to stop Bush, pressed poll workers to count
every single hanging chad assuming these were, of course, Democrat votes that
would put Gore over the top.
A hanging chad is something of a relic these days because the system
has completely changed since then.
Back in the good old days when Florida used paper ballots voters pushed
a button or pulled a leaver that had something like a typewriter key push
through a spot on the ballot much like the old-fashioned computer cards which
read IBM machines in the 1950s. Scanners then looked for the holes to determine
which candidate the voter preferred.
But sometimes the machines did not actually press through the paper and
merely left an impression so that the vote was unclear.
Because the election was so close, Democrats demanded that any vote
that appeared even with a little dent suggested the intent of the voter and
should have been counted
In some cases, the hanging chads clung to the paper, partially poked
through or perhaps not even barely a dent.
The Florida election eventually went to the Supreme Court which ruled
in the gop's favor not just on this but on the fact that the vote needed to be
limited to clear intent and not up to poll workers to assume what a voter meant.
Ultimately both sides condemned the poor hanging chad for the outcome
and so this poor unfortunate has lived with a stain on its conscience ever
since.
The hanging chad situation and other similar issues in other states
resulted in a massive change in the way voting machines were designed. The old
mechanical machines dumped for new and improved computer-based voting machines
that were supposed to make votes clear.
Unfortunately, two things evolved since then many of these machines did
not supply a paper back up to show the actual vote count and so those checking
the machines at the end of the night could accidentally or intentionally erase
the vote count. This could have more
influence over at the outcome of an election than the hanging chad ever did
especially when votes tended to evaporate in areas that were known to benefit
one political party or another such as what appeared to happen in the 2004
election in States like Ohio.
You would think that this more recent history of voter abuse would have
vindicated the hanging chad. But no. The poor unfortunate retained its reputation
as being evil.
Still worse and more recent was the illusion that the Russians could
hack into individual machines and thus do the work the hanging chad has been
accused of.
Over these long years, this did nothing to actually remove the stain of
guilt from the hanging chad even though the Russian conspiracy has become the
new mythology for how elections can be stolen.
Blaming the Russians allowed Democrats to lick their wounds after a
botched 2016 election in which the hanging chad played no part.
Although media and others claim voter fraud largely does not exist, the
truth of the matter is that it is more prevalent than most can imagine. It
happens in every election happening in every election and it is not the hanging
chad that is the culprit.
But rather, the real guilty party is a thing called the absentee ballot
and a number of other similar initiatives in which votes, and registration can
be done by mail or outside the voting booth or election office – where laws governing
fraud cannot fully monitor.
Absentee ballots have since been called other things such as vote by
mail or early voting and has replaced the hanging chad as the chief suspect in
any corrupt election.
The great problem for voter fraud is that you can pay for votes such as
people tried and still try. There are several cases in New Jersey where it has
been proven to still go on. But those paying for the voters largely can’t guarantee
how the person will actually vote in the voting booth.
Some political figures hoped to cure this by allowing voters to photograph
themselves in the voting booth in what is called selfies and thus prove who
they voted for and collect their fee. But this is still an unresolved solution
for the corrupt official in many states that still frown upon such activities.
By far, a more certain way to guarantee the vote that you paid for is
by mail in early or absentee ballot in which a campaign worker can sit with the
person help fill out the paperwork, seal it, and then transported to the
election office or mail it by the post -- thus guaranteeing a vote.
In some cases, these can be accumulated and stored for a particular
time when the vote is so close, and they can magically appear in time to
influence a close election such as the one in Florida.
This, of course, has nothing to do with the hanging chad nor should the
hanging chad suffer consequences for it -- even though it is taking place in
the same state and having a similar negative effect on the outcome.
Another technique for steering elections -- that the hanging chad is
innocent of completely -- is the concept of bundling votes.
This is a concept that was developed by a scurrilous group of bankers
and mortgage brokers who decided they would give loans for homes that they knew
could never be paid back and when those poor people could not make the payments
and the loans went bad, the mortgage brokers bundled these in with good loans
to sell to investors. This is a lot like
having a bundle of money with $100 bill on the top of the bottom and a bunch of
blank pieces of paper or counterfeit bills in the middle with the hopes of
securing someone into thinking they were getting something they were not.
Unfortunately, this scam -- which some claim is taking place in Florida
right now -- cannot be explained as an innocent mistake the way some explain
the concept of interpreting hanging chads in the year 2000 but would need to
involve corrupt poll workers with royalties to one party or the other and since
the biggest beneficiary of this would be the Democrats you have to think the
mistakes would are on their behalf.
The only good that might come of all this if the election goes the way
Democrats and media hope is that the hanging chad will finally get off the hook
as a mythological bad guy.
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