The Danger of Believing in Stolen Elections
Elections are unfair, no doubt about that. Some candidates
have more money and the media is far from a level playing field. Election administrators
bend and break the rules to help or hurt candidates. Voters take all these
factors into consideration when they cast their ballots and make the best of a
bad bargain.
But a stolen election is more
than a contest with rigged rules and biased coverage. A stolen election is when
the person who lost the election is given the office. This happened in 2000
when the Supreme Court put the loser in the White House. (Don't take my word
for this, read Down and Dirty: The Plot
to Steal the Presidency by Jake Tapper [how do you think he got to be an
anchor? by suppressing the findings of his own research] and Jeffrey Toobin's Too Close to
Call.)
But long before 2000, in
1960, Richard Nixon lost a close race to John F. Kennedy. Nixon was convinced
that the election had been stolen from him by ballot box stuffing in Chicago by
Mayor Richard Daley. Nixon was wrong. Kennedy won the election legitimately. If
you're interested, you can read my article "Kennedy Won the 1960 Election
Honestly" (http://www.leinsdorf.com/kennedy.htm)
What matters is that Nixon believed the 1960 election had
been stolen from him. This belief prompted Nixon to see the 1968 "October
Surprise" bombing halt as another ploy to steal the election from him, so
he colluded with President Thieu of South Vietnam to
sabotage the Johnson's diplomatic peace initiative. This is really treason,
conducting an independent foreign policy that was costing American lives by
prolonging the war in order to win an election. Then, once in the White House,
Nixon's paranoia about non-existent political sabotage prompted him to make all
the mistakes that led to Watergate. His guilty conscience about his collusion
with Thieu to undermine Johnson's last minute peace
initiative was what prompted him to resign. (Note: Watergate was just a
kerfuffle. The real story turns out that Mark Felt, the Number 2 at the FBI,
was the Deep Throat who leaked confidential FBI investigative information to
Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington
Post. Why was the FBI out to get Nixon? The right wing felt betrayed by
Nixon's opening to China. Nixon had built his entire political career as a
fervent anti-communist. Going to Beijing was too much for the White men at the
FBI which was molded in J. Edgar Hoover's image. The controversy over James Comey's attempt to throw the 2016 election to Trump came as
no surprise to those who remember Watergate.)
My bigger point is that Nixon's
belief that the 1960 election was stolen from him caused him to make stupid
paranoid counter-moves that led to Watergate, and then to resign which brought
Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld to power, the thieves of the 2000 election and the
architects of the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 1988 Election
In the wake of George H.W.
Bush's victory in 1988, the Democrats decided that dirty tricks or unethical
conduct were responsible for the defeat of Mike Dukakis, specifically the
Willie Horton ad. Dukakis had been ahead in the polls
until then. They were wrong, of course.
Dukakis never had a chance. Dukakis didn't even make it into the top 1/3 of the
winning candidates for Governor of Massachusetts since World War II, so his
campaign was doomed from the start. But remember, the Democratic field in 1988
was called "The Seven Dwarfs" after Senator Gary Hart dropped out.
As a result of Democratic
sour grapes, they sabotaged the nomination of John Tower to be Secretary of
Defense. Tower was accused of drinking
too much and pinching women's behinds, a clear disqualification for a position
at the head of an organization whose major function is killing people en masse.
Tower's defeat was the first defeat of a newly elected president's cabinet
nominee in American history. John Tower, who had served almost 24 years as the
Senator from Texas and had a string of firsts (First Republican U.S. senator
from Texas since Reconstruction; the first Republican elected to any statewide
office in Texas since Reconstruction; and the first Republican from the former
Confederacy ever to win a Senate seat by popular vote) was widely considered to be the most
knowledgeable Senator about defense procurement.
Tower's rejection was doubly galling given the tradition
of Senatorial courtesy. The Senate was often described as a "gentleman's
club" where senators treated each other with respect regardless of their
differing political opinions. The defeat of Tower was a disaster because Dick
Cheney became Secretary of Defense. Tower, as Secretary of Defense, with
President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, the three top
foreign policy positions in government: President, Secretary of State and
Secretary of Defense, would have been the only enlisted man in the
decision-making hierarchy. Bush and Baker, both the products of elite prep schools
and Ivy League universities, could have used from leavening from a public high
school educated enlisted Navy man who had served as a Boatswain's Mate on an
LCS (Landing Craft Support) in the Pacific during World War II. Dick Cheney, by
contrast, was an Ivy League dropout and draft dodger during the Vietnam War.
The nonstop wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are the result of these war
mongering elites' control of American foreign policy.
Without the misguided belief in
the stolen elections of 1960 and 1988, none of these people would have ever
come to power to steal the 2000 election and to open the door to the election
of Donald Trump.
Undermining Confidence in Democracy - Trump's Claim of Massive
Vote Fraud in the 2016 Election
President Trump rose to national
political prominence on the back of the birther
movement, the allegations that President Obama was
not eligible to be president because "he was born in Kenya." Trump
gave these absurd and clearly false allegations legitimacy and, by implication,
gave credence to the millions of racists who felt, in their hearts, that no one
could really vote for a Black person for president, so Obama's
election must have been the result of massive election fraud.
The Republicans signed on to
this narrative by passing, state by state, increasingly stringent voter
identification requirements: photo ID's, skewed against students, the poor and
the elderly; proof of citizenship, attacks on same day registration, reduced
early voting opportunities and hours. The racist Supreme Court, on the heels of
its awarding the presidency to George W. Bush, upheld these stricter voter
registration requirements, thereby lending legitimacy to the claims of voter
fraud, but without any proof. Absent in these arguments is any discussion of
what was previously required to cast a ballot. Before these changes, voters
were still required to sign their names TWICE when voting at the polls. Polling
places are geographic locations serving about a thousand voters who live
nearby. The poll workers usually also live in the election district or nearby
and know the voters by sight and often by name, because they usually live in
the same neighborhood and shop in the same stores.
So, the only purpose to these stringent voter
identification requirements and allegations of fraud is to make it difficult to
vote and to undermine people's confidence in democracy and get them to accept
authoritarian or dictatorial government. Logically, the allegations of voter
fraud can be disproved just by looking at the turnout. Even in the hotly
contested 2016 presidential election, almost 4 out of every 10 eligible voters
did not cast ballots. There were variations, of course, from a high turnout of
75% in Minnesota to a low of 43% in Hawaii. The turnout in non-presidential
races is even lower.
The people who allege voter fraud
are asking us to believe that in elections where a minimum of 40% of people who
are ELIGIBLE don't vote, that there are millions and millions of people who are
ineligible clamoring to break the law and cast ballots. The argument is ridiculous,
especially for people who work in politics and know how difficult it is to
persuade legitimate voters to go to the polls.
This drumbeat of "your
vote doesn't matter" and "your vote doesn't count" and media
coverage of polls rather than of the candidates and their positions, the
negative campaigning, the rigged rules that require candidates to raise massive
amounts of money are all designed to keep independent voters at home and to
undermine people's faith in the legitimacy of elections so they will accept the
loss of their rights. All the more power and profit to the media and the
incumbents who do not then need to meet the needs of the non-voters.
The best you can say about
Trump, who lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, is that his claims
of voter fraud are a tactic to try and legitimize a mandate for his program
that he does not have. At worst, you can say that Trump is trying to take the
United States into a dictatorship through the back door. New Jersey has already
perfected the means of disenfranchising voters without their knowledge. But
rest assured, little good comes from elections where leaders lack a mandate or
where leaders act like the election was not legitimate so they can do whatever
they want or can get away with. A good example is Governor Chris Christie, who
spent the Fourth of July weekend at his official beach house on Long Beach
Island that was closed to the public because of a budget dispute and Christie
shut the park. Do you think he was chosen in a democratic election, a man who
publicly displays his being above the law? Don't be absurd.
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