My Answer to Ed Kilgore’s Question: Chain of Custody, Open Verifiable Counts

Posted: August 4, 2023 by datechguy in election 2020, election 2024, elections

At NY Mag Ed Kilgore asks: What Would a ‘Legitimate’ Biden Victory Look Like to Republicans? and attacks the very notion that an election might be questioned as bigotry:

There’s a sort of ancestral white Anglo-Saxon Protestant belief that “big-city machines” controlled by Democrats use chicanery to get their voters to the polls and then to put heavy thumbs on the scales to change the results. This mythology — which goes back to lurid tales of “bosses” buying votes from Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century — is hard to shake, closely connected as it is to racial and ethnic prejudices. And speaking of prejudices, today’s conservatives continue to embrace the idea that minority voters — including immigrants — “vote themselves government benefits” in a way that creates a corrupt bargain between liberal elites and their inner-city clientele. It was exactly what Mitt Romney was talking about when he was caught on tape in 2012 warning Republicans that “47 percent” of voters are non-taxpaying parasites in the bag for the opposition. If you feel that way, then you don’t need evidence of specific irregularities to feel that any Democratic presidency is in some respects “illegitimate.”

For all his bluster the answer is quite simple:

  1. A Clear chain of custody for the ballots to ensure they are actually being cast by the voters in question.
  2. An open, transparent and verifiable count of the ballots accepted, preferably streamed so there can be no question that it is honest.

An election under those condition would be no more questionable than the score of yesterday’s Jets Vs Browns game. Everyone who watched saw the players play, everyone who watched saw the calls made and the points being scored and everyone who didn’t watch can access both the video and the audio calls of the game that were made at the time.

Why we would insist on such openness in determining the results of sporting contests and not do so for the election of our leaders is odd.

So Ed if you want me to trust the count on election night, that’s all I need.

Closing thought: Glenn Reynolds posted this at 7:42 PM tonight:

IT CAN’T BE A FRINGE BELIEF IT THAT MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE IT: 69% of Republicans now believe Biden’s 2020 win was illegitimate: New poll released before Trump’s January 6 arraignment shows GOP supporters believe there WAS widespread fraud.

And, regardless of actual fraud, if your electoral system is that untrusted, it’s time to make it more clearly trustworthy. The failure — more like refusal — to do that is producing a constitutional crisis in this country.

emphasis mine

I left the following comment:

If the charges of fraud were specious the media and government agencies in charges of the specific counts would have happily and enthusiastically demonstrated the fact with the evidence of same.

That they never did speaks volumes

When people aren’t transparent it’s for a reason.

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