Vote Early, Count Early

Sometimes I can find arguments to pull apart on Facebook like they grow on trees, yet other times the trees are bare. But today I had one fall right into my lap. Someone dropped an Anonymous comment on my last post that just took my breath away. There were so many faults there I barely knew where to start with a reply.

It was completely off-topic for a post about legalizing pot, which is a reliable indicator for a troll with an agenda.

I wrote a short reply anyway, knowing I could flesh it out in today’s post because there are multiple fronts for dissection:

·         This is a complete, raging, logical fallacy, as there is obviously zero correlation between the quality of any candidate and when the votes are counted. That right there is enough to dismiss it from serious consideration. Whether you count it before or after Election Day, a legal vote is a legal vote. Period.

·         The commenter, of course, is passing on the conservative trope that some kind of nefarious, liberal, monkey-business going with mail-in and drop-off voting. Not that anything has been proven or even reliably demonstrated. It just is because they want it to be. It’s the only way they can rationalize that their point of view is not dominant throughout the country.

·         Explain how when using the same methodology, there is less “Trustable, reliable, secure” counting going on before Election Day than there is after? Is he charging that there’s a completely different set of rules for counting votes prior to Election Day? (Probably, despite the fact that the idea is ludicrous.) They won’t recognize that Republicans (mostly TFG) engineered the high likelihood that most of the late-counted votes being Democratic, by exhorting their own people to vote in person. If TFG didn’t rail against mail-in voting like he did, the late returns would have come in more evenly. Obviously, it wouldn’t change the count, it would just rearrange the order of the returns. Note to Election Deniers:

o   1+2+3=6

o   2+1+3=6

o   3+1+2=6

o   2+3+1=6.  Etc.

See, in any order you count it, you still get the same result. Biden won.

TFG and his minions had a pretty good idea that he wasn’t going to win, so he created the very set of circumstances he then used to contest the result. That’s fine for a Banana Republic dictator, but it doesn’t fly for the President of the United States.

·         If you want the results on (or near) Election Day, in 2022, you’d better start counting them early. There are far too many mailed and dropped-off votes in play to only start counting after the polls close, without severely delaying the results. Maryland is expecting over 400,000 of them. And remember, until this election, Maryland state law decreed that they can’t even start counting the votes until the Thursday after Election Day! Weren’t Republicans also complaining about counting votes that far past Election Day? (Answer: yes they were. They even went to court to stop the counting, (in places they were ahead, of course).

This guy is on it.

·         This line of complaint is in sync with Republicans’ overall messaging, as relayed by Fox “News” and other such open-air sewage systems, that mail-in voting is inherently corrupt. This is despite there being zero evidence of any widespread malfeasance, or even just enough to tip a single election, despite there being several states who have used mail-in voting extensively for ten years or more, without incident. And in some of these states, especially rural ones, Republicans have been mailing in their votes too.

What it comes down to is that mail-in voting is just too easy. It allows the common people a much faster and easier method of voting, and that’s the LAST thing the rich Republican donors want. Rich people don’t want poor people voting, because it might cost them money, especially if the poor realize how badly they’re getting ripped off. So they want long lines. They want fewer voting machines in more populous areas. They want to require the specific IDs their opponent’s voters are least likely to have. They want to make it more expensive and time-consuming to get those IDs. They want it to be inconvenient to vote so that the huddled masses STAY HOME and let the well-to-do keep carving up the country’s resources for themselves.

On a Lighter Note…

I might have stumbled onto a more entertaining way to deter Jehovah’s Witnesses and other doorstep pests:

If this catches on, I just may have to invest in that front-door surveillance camera system that I’ve been avoiding.

Also, how long before someone claims “Devil Vagina Magic” as the name for their all-female punk band?