[conspire] Stolen election narratives, CA edition

[Josef Grosch]

On 9/19/21 2:20 PM, Rick Moen wrote:


[ DELETED ]

> The notion of using _that_ form of ballot harvesting to "rig" an
> election seems... impractical?  I mean, how does it work?  Do
> I put up a folding table outside the Save the Baby Seals Club
> with a sign saying "Hi, please entrust your treehugger bleeding heart
> liberal ballots to me.  Trust me, I'll take your ballots to an official
> dropbox."  And then, having collected 500 envelopes, and wishing to skew
> the mayoral election in favour of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, I
> go home and create a cheery ballot bonfire?  Is that it?   I mean,
> sure, there are always gullible people, but it seems something of a
> self-limiting problem, and not a useful machine-politics tactic, on
> balance.


I think you hit the nail on the head, these forms of election rigging 
are dead and gone for one simple reason, numbers.

Walking around paying people to vote one way or another might have 
worked during the high point of Tammany Hall (1886 or so) when the 
population of NYC was hovering around 1.5 million but by the time zayde 
was helping out people with "cab fare" the population had grown to 
around 7.5 million. I don't remember exactly but at that time, 
mid-1960's, a precinct was around 2,500 to 3,000 voters. By the 
mid-1960's NYC was a solid democratic city and I'm sure that most of the 
people who got "cab fare" would have voted democratic anyway, it was the 
party thanking guys for being loyal. Zayde never talked to more than 30 
or 40 people before heading to his favorite bar to nurse a beer, talking 
politics and the Yankees with the bartender, barely 1% of the precinct.

The elephant in the room that none of these people jumping up and down 
about rigged elections ever talk about is how many ballots would have to 
be stolen and/or changed to sway an election one way or another. That 
number is so large and so blatant that election officials would notice 
and put a stop to it. The people who run elections in this country have 
all heard the stories of election fraud in NYC and Chicago (an 
oft-repeated joke in Chicago; "Cook county where the dead vote often and 
in alphabetical order") and have put in-place safeguards to catch 
efforts. What voter fraud that has happened in the last few elections 
was on the order 20 or 30 cases out of millions of votes cast and most 
times its some idiot using his dead mothers mail-in ballot.

If one is going to get wound up about rigged elections try focusing on 
the electronic voting machines. The software that run those machine is 
propriety and no one outside of those companies has ever seen the source 
code let alone had a chance to analyze it. Only the executive of these 
companies know what sort of fuckery is going on in the code.


Josef

-- 
Josef Grosch            | Another day closer |
jgrosch at MooseRiver.com  | to Redwood Heaven  | Berkeley, Ca.