His federal crimes will go away, and his NY state crimes will require fines at most. Trump wants to win because his narcissism demands that he not be a loser. He doesn’t like losers, so he can’t be one. We have much to fear from Trump’s machinations, but two states showed us this week how Republicans have been cheating to win elections, so we are forewarned.
In the Mississippi governor’s race runoff of Republican candidates, a video was made showing how election machines allowed votes for only one specific candidate (think it may have been the first name listed). Votes for the other Republican in the runoff were automatically changed back to the other name. Someone forgot to re-program the machine for a Republican runoff and left it to automatically flip the Democratic vote to Republican. Uh oh.
In Georgia, in a precinct just outside Athens (actually, Kemp’s home precinct), here’s what the Atlanta Journal Constitution said: “On machine No. 3, Republicans won every race. On each of the other six machines in that precinct, Democrats won every race.The odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million, according to a statistician’s analysis in court documents. The strange results would disappear if votes for Democratic and Republican candidates were flipped on machine No. 3.”
Given that votes were changed from Democratic candidates to Republicans, we can expect the same tactics to be tried in 2020. So how do we combat this?
1. Put Republicans on notice that we, as citizens, are watching and will use exit polls to help verify votes. People claimed that exit polls were unreliable in 2016, but perhaps they were unreliable because the vote was being manipulated.
2. Register as many people as we can and help get them to the polls.
3. Write letters/emails/tweets, whatever to the media to try to get them to focus more on these stories.
4. Encourage people to take use their phones to take photos of their final votes in systems with no backup. If election officials know that voters are doing this, they might be less likely to tamper with the votes. I know this is illegal in some states, but it’s my vote and I’m willing to take the risk.
5. Ask the Carter Center for election monitoring of the worst states (especially swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, possibly North and South Carolina and Florida). They can’t detect programming issues, but the fact that their representatives are monitoring some precincts might be a deterrent, and it says a lot about our elections that they need outside monitoring.
6. What else?
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