Biden got 11 million votes – or maybe 15 million – more than Obama in 2008. Trump got 23% more than McCain. And Washington Post columnist Philip Bump brands the 2020 turnout (in “Actually, it makes perfect sense that Biden would get more votes than Obama”) as “not ahistorical”. Amazingly, he then goes on to explain why it was “ahistorical”. What’s up? In 2020, the country was showered with pieces of paper (mailed ballots) that may or may not have been reflective of warm bodies or active brains. It certainly is responsible to ask whether each one of those pieces of paper represents a thinking human being or warm body when ballots were thrown to the wind like Deutsch marks in the hyper-inflationary Germany of 1923 ($1 = 4,210,500,000,000 German marks). Bump presents some sound reasoning and then falls off the cart. In fact, our election system is a joke that became a belly laugh in 2020.
Bump partially attributes the larger turnout to population growth. But that speculation doesn’t pass the smell test. The hordes in the US grew by about 31 million from 2008 to 2020, but those new bodies may not translate into more voters since they increasingly represent demographics that historically don’t vote . . . unless Tammany Hall never went away. The young and immigrants dominate the additions to the vote-eligible legions. The story is more than a myth that new immigrants were met at the docks with a job, a promise to get the oldest daughter married, and a ballot. The young and immigrants with their offspring are too busy with other things on their minds. Voting doesn’t quite catch up on the list of priorities with hooking up or working hard to get established in the new country. Unless, of course, the get-out-the-vote (gotv) campaign consists of cajoling, enticements, or harassment, or worse. Free will gets overwhelmed by the pressure from the political machine.
Machines still exist, by the way. Some states and most big cities function as Maduro regimes (of Venezuela fame).
And what to make of that free will? Free will turns into mush after constant pestering, or the election system comes to you in the mail to facilitate “social” voting, the opposite of the secret ballot. Ballots go to buildings and who knows what’s happening behind those walls. Group voting, one person voting for many, peer pressure? It’s highly questionable whether each piece of paper is correlated to the free will of an individual person legally entitled to vote, let alone one above room temperature. It’s hard to say how legitimate the election is when we pull crazy stunts like this. A person can be forgiven for thinking that we systematically and legally promoted fraud and then called it voter enthusiasm, like Bump.
Our intrepid Washington Post columnist is probably correct when he cites higher enthusiasm in this election, as is true of every presidential election cycle. He then tried to pinpoint Trump as the catalyst. In his mind, the greater attention this time around was really a referendum on Trump. The election was a hate-Trump or love-Trump excursion, Biden being the beneficiary of a larger hate-Trump mob.
Could be, but my olfactory glands are once again aroused. This smells too much like east coast, beltway confirmation bias, or wishful thinking, at work. Bump so strongly wishes it to be true that he massages his reasoning to make it true. I can’t say for sure that Bump is a partisan but a person can be forgiven for reaching the conclusion if the writer subject is cloistered in a mass of homogeneous minds to such an extent that he uses the data to validate the suffocating group mind of his surroundings.
By his own reckoning, and Gallup polling, 2020 was no more of an attention-grabbing hullabaloo than 2008. And this, in addition to the increase in non-voting demographics, is supposed to explain the popularity of a candidate with the charisma of a grilled cheese sandwich and the mental acuity of an early stage Alzheimer’s patient? Philip, I’m sorry, this dog won’t hunt.
Gallup has a credibility problem anyway. These people weren’t any more capable of measuring the Trump vote than the others. As it turned out, contra their predictions, 45,000 additional Trump votes in a few states would have Trump crowing before the press of another “landslide” in the face of their glowering stares. Their faulty estimation of the state of the electorate raises serious questions about their ability in measuring something as abstruse as the emotional state – like “enthusiasm” – of that very same public. Citing them isn’t much different than resorting to tarot cards.
The predictions of the polls are reminiscent of the difference between a WAG and SWAG in the realm of probabilities. Both are wild a** guesses, but the latter adds numbers.
Today, our discredited cultural elites tell us to shut up and accept the codger as our new god-in-waiting. Just one year before, they were wringing their hands over the voting public’s decision to install Trump. How could that be, they wondered? Their answer was to throw aspersions on the 2016 election. They ran with the orchestrated lie of a Trump-Putin cabal, and threw in, for good measure, broad complaints about the American election system. Now that’s something I can buy, and I’m not speaking of the Russia charade. Our system is a mess. We are morally disqualified from being members of UN election observer teams.
Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in January 2019 writing for AP, while most likely wringing her hands over an election system that produced Trump, hit upon some truth before there was a 2020 imbroglio. She wrote a telling piece, “American elections ranked worst among Western democracies. Here’s why.” Portions of her analysis have as much a ring of truth in 2020 as it did for 2016. She cites her own Electoral Integrity Project, an operation that she directs, and the 2014 report of the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Both make some good points.
In her AP article, she heaped abuse on our election system, and rightly so. She particularly mentioned the fractured nature of our election system with many voting regimes scattered among the 50 states and thousands of election boards, all varying in their degrees of efficiency and integrity. In her reckoning, partisanship is allowed to play a huge role in writing the laws and administering the distribution and counting of the pieces of paper in each one of the enclaves, and I agree.
That might explain why Montana’s vote is more valid than the ones coming out of urban one-party states. These single-party fiefdoms don’t have competitive opposition to keep them honest. Graft becomes honest graft in the memorable words of George Washington Plunkitt. In other words, electoral fraud becomes easy, legal, or hidden without the presence of a powerful opposition riding herd on the rulers. Little of this will come to light because little is open to effective scrutiny.
It’s especially true in vote-by-mail schemes. Once a mail-in ballot is removed from the envelope and added to the stack, and the privacy envelope with the signature is tossed to the wind, what integrity check is there? The vote gets certified and real skullduggery will be relegated to the mists of urban myth, popular only among the losers.
Norris goes off the rails into fantasy when she points to proportional representation gambits and heightening “convenience” as ways to improve the system. The proportional approach splits party representation by the percentage of the vote. It’s most commonly associated with parliamentary systems, which is less problematic when there just two parties, and a disaster when there are many. Splinter parties become kingmakers and coalition governments teeter into instability. Israel in the past year and a half had 3 elections and is probably heading to their fourth. The suggestion piles instability on top of our current mess of chaotic vote regimes and vote procedures that turn election season into a farcical sitcom.
As for “convenience”, there’s nothing more convenient than vote-by-mail, and there’s nothing that does more to conjure an absence of faith in the results. The whole artifice abolishes the secret ballot, which ensures that the marks on the piece of paper reflect the conscience of a single person acting independently, while eliminating the close supervision that is only possible from in-person voting. With no secrecy guaranteeing that the vote reflects the will of an individual person and no supervision in the act of voting, what can go wrong, eh? Plenty.
One question that escapes serious consideration is this one: Should every eligible voter vote? The message is rammed home that everyone “should” vote. It’s as if the only expectation for the voter is to mechanically mark the piece of paper, not to bring anything more to the act. I beg to differ. Voting should be left to those who’ve given the matters in question the requisite effort and thought to understand the matters before them. The mentally incontinent and indifferent should be at the top of the list of people who should be shamed from voting – not banned through a poll test, but shamed.
Instead, there’s a concerted effort to bring out the mentally incontinent and indifferent by making the act of voting “convenient”. One thing that this election teaches us is that convenience can only come at the expense of deteriorating credibility. If an election lacks trustworthiness, but is imposed on the population nonetheless, we’ll have all the makings for grave upheaval thereafter.
Our choices are clear regardless of any partisan result. Vote-by-mail should end, with it only justified in very limited and carefully tailored circumstances. Election day should be a holiday to get the 95% of the electorate to appear at the precinct in person. If you have to wait in line, the experience will remind you that the day is set aside for you to vote. Early voting, in-person only, should be limited to a week before election day. Precise national standards should be in place for national elections and a slew of stricter guidelines for all others. DOJ should man-up for swift investigations and prosecutions of violators, with similar requirements at the state level.
Our present system is a farce. We should be rightly viewed as a laughingstock by the rest of the world. Who are we to pass judgment on any poor country’s election system when we have this mess visited upon us very 2 to 4 years? Ours is a third world election system, American style. Maduro has a similar one, Venezuela style.
RogerG
** Also on my Facebook page.