48 Hours

Will it be orange – or red?

We’ll know in about 48 hours.  Or maybe not. For some very odd reason that we’re being conditioned to accept as routine – so that it can be routinized – it now takes days or even weeks to determine which of two candidates received the most votes. This is particularly off-putting given most of these votes are collected electronically. Isn’t the whole point of electronic vote-collection to make the process more efficient?

Of course, all it has done is make the process more opaque.

The Great Gripe many have about the last selection is that no one really knows who won.  Well, no one outside the ambit of the rather undemocratic entities – the private companies – who have a lock (literally) on the workings of the voting machines, over which they assert a proprietary claim. This, too, is odd – yet accepted – because it has been routinized. Like the appalling (to those who remember when it was not routine) business of having to submit to being physically touched in intimate areas – to being touched, at all – for absolutely no reason specific to you by a government worker in order to be allowed to board a commercial flight. Once upon a time, people who weren’t criminals or suspected of being criminals were free to travel unmolested, if you can imagine that. It was kind of like being free to speak.

You had to be there.

There were, of course, attempts to find out who won. These were styled “insurrections” and a “threat to our democracy”- an interesting construction. These were summarily dismissed as well as disparaged – not on the merits but rather because (said the courts) the complainants lacked “standing.” This is also an interesting construction in that everyone who is a voting age citizen arguably has “standing” – to know whether an election outcome that directly affects them was or was not legitimate.

Never mind. The courts “ruled” – that is, the courts decreed – otherwise. They decreed that the votes that were cast could not be retroactively vetted, something that ought to have been done prior to the votes being counted. These are facts. And so it is that to this very day – just two days before another election – it is still not known who actually won the last one.

Both sides claim they did, but that is not the same thing. The skullduggery and opacity have greatly delegitimized what was once regarded by most – rightly or delusionally – as at least an honest process. Whether it is honest to vote to have this rhetorical entity styled “government” – which is just other people who wield the power of government – take away some people’s money and give it to others and things of that nature is a subject for another time.

What is about to take place in 48 hours from now could be the last election held in what is still referred to delusionally as the United States of America – which are about as “united” as a mob of angry cats because no matter the outcome, neither side is likely to accept it as legitimate for precisely the same reason the last election held is widely and understandably regarded by many as illegitimate.

The votes that were cast ought not to have been recounted; they ought to have been vetted.

Ideally, prior to the first count.

This is a basic – arguably foundational – competence absent which no system that is based on voting can retain its legitimacy. The voters show up – on Election Day, which was once one day before 2020 – when “because COVID” it became election months. They  establish they have a right to vote by producing the same ID everyone is required to produce in order to buy cough syrup or cash a check – and that everyone who isn’t a vagrant or someone who has no right to vote already possesses. They are then allowed to cast a paper ballot that correlates with their legal person, so that both can be checked and verified in the event any questions arise about the legitimacy of the vote – or the voter.

It is a crashing imbecility – no, something worse – to suggest that vetting voters is “voter suppression” and that paper ballots that can be checked by the people is some kind of “threat to our democracy.”

It is of course precisely the opposite – magnifying and distilling the effrontery of it.

If the voters were vetted prior to their being allowed to vote – and if the votes cast were not ones and twos in a lock-box laptop that is owned by some private company rather than the property of the people, as it ought to be in a democracy – then both sides would at least have the comfort of knowing that if their side lost, it was because more people voted for the other side. This may not make it right – as voting to take away what’s not yours can never be right – but at least you had an honest chance to vote not to take what isn’t yours.

And that others not take what isn’t theirs.

There is also the hope that – come the next election – the vote will go in a better direction.

That hope is now gone, no matter which side is declared to be the “winner” in about 48 hours – or several weeks from now. Neither side is going to accept it and it is highly likely that one side will do more than just not accept it.

The results of that vote may well prove to be as consequential as the vote taken by the states of the Souther Confederacy in 1861. The people of those states also felt the system was illegitimate – and they were right, because it was. The more industrialized and more populous North had effective control of the federal government and they had elected a man – Abraham Lincoln – who was regarded by them as an existential threat because he represented the money power of the North, which sought to enslave more than just the South. Abe would end up enslaving everyone – North and South.

But he was at least elected and no one disputes that he was.

Imagine what may happen in just 48 hours from now.

. . .

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