Mike

Tens of thousands of citizens wait in line for upwards of an hour to perform a sacred rite of citizenship, to vote for the people who will run the government. Yet when they get to the actual voting booth they are unable to cast their votes because the “tabulators won’t read the ballots.” Many are sent to other polling places, where if they don’t find the same problem with the equipment, they are unable to vote because they are recorded as having already voted. As a stop-gap the election authority decides to place the unreadable ballots into a special box at each polling place so that they can be later scanned, but many of those ballots are mixed-up with discarded ballots and presumably lost.

The race for chief executive was decided by a margin of little more than 17,000 votes out of more than 2.5 million votes cast with the political establishment’s preferred candidate winning.

So where is this place of strange elections and funny results? Putin’s Russia? Early 20th-Century Mississippi or Chicago? The country of some South American tin-pot despot of yore? Nope 2022 Maricopa County, the 3rd largest voting district in the country, and key to what many are calling the most important presidential election in more than 160 years.

Read more

A couple of things.

First, a common perception of elections is entangled with the misty notions of a vindication of democracy. Alternatively there is also the view of an annoying process of choosing the lesser of two evils. However, it is also an operational process similar to many others; composed of discrete elements (voter registration, polling station management, vote counting) that must work correctly within a series of dependencies and certain time periods. If that operational process is riddled with problems, then you are going to have a hard time having people accept the final product (an election outcome).

Second, a guiding principle of organizational analysis is a form of “revealed preference”: if you want to know what an organization values, look at what it actually does as opposed to what it says.

Read more

David and Sgt. Mom have done an excellent job expressing their concerns about the upcoming election. Accordingly, I will express mine.

We are on the precipice of a disaster.

There are several reasons for my belief.

The first is our voting system. Our system with the proliferation of mail-in balloting and lack of auditable controls seems purpose-designed to breed mistrust and corruption. Also while we talk about how voting now occurs before Election Day, we do not discuss the implications that in many jurisdictions it takes days if not weeks to count the ballots, which presents opportunities for mischief.

The second is the level of rhetoric from the Left over the past week, call it the “Hitler Gambit.”

There has been a lot of criticism from the Right regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic “revealing” Trump’s affinity for Hitler. The critics says that the revelations are old and thinly sourced. The critics miss the point, which is that Goldberg’s article wasn’t so much meant to be an “October Surprise” as it was to give the Democrats the news hook they needed to launch their final argument that Trump is a fascist.

The Goldberg article was merely the starter’s gun for that final argument. Keep in mind that the owner of The Atlantic is Kamala’s “first friend.” On the same day that Goldberg’s article dropped, as if it was a coincidence, we had both the White House confirming that Biden believes Trump is a fascist, and Kamala remarking that Trump was a fascist and, given that and his affinity for Hitler, could not ever be trusted to return to the White House.

Just in case anyone missed the point, Kamala delivered her remarks not as a presidential candidate with an off-the-cuff comment, but in her official capacity with a prepared statement in front of the Vice President’s Residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory.

After delivering her remarks, Kamala turned and left without answering any questions. That is most curious, because if she thought that Trump was within a few weeks of bringing a dark, fascist night onto America, what did she think her and every American’s moral responsibility would be to stop him? Would President Biden, and she as Vice President, in good conscience ever turn over the keys of the White House, even with a clear electoral result, to a man they thought would destroy the Republic? As Justice Robert Jackson once said, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

The third is the Democrats’ declining belief in our Constitution.

Read more