Since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, there have been accusations of voter fraud that continue even now, 11 years later. During that time, there have been three Presidential elections, 6 elections for the House, 6 elections for the Senate, and countless local and state elections across the country. Still, voter fraud is an acceptable and expected charge in each election.
The latest is in Wisconsin. A Supreme Court seat was up for a vote. The incumbent, a Republican, was expected to win and turnout was expected to be low for this election. Due to the recent events in Wisconsin with them trying to balance their budget, and the challenge to the recent law passed regarding collective bargaining, this election could decide the fate of the recently passed law.
The Democrat, JoAnne Kloppenburg would rule against the collective bargaining agreement and the Republican, David Prosser would rule in favor of the agreement. That would be the swing vote deciding the fate of Wisconsin's collective bargaining law.
I will put aside the problem I have with either side already knowing how a judge would rule before arguments are even heard before the court and talk about the election results. Originally, Kloppenburg claimed victory the day after the election, but Prosser did not concede saying their numbers still looked strong.
The margin of victory in the preliminary annoucements regarding the results showed that Kloppenburg had indeed won by 204 votes. It was then reported the next day that a bag of votes had been found that hadn't been counted. This was apparently an errant report. What was found was that the city of Brookfields votes were not reported by the County clerk in the announcement.
The margin of victory changed and has gone to the Republican. Prosser now leads by 6,744 votes. This is a seemingly insurmountable lead.
With all of the voter fraud accusations over the past decade, I find it hard to believe that a county clerk would purposely ignore one city's vote count to create a controversy. On the other hand, you never know about people these days. After all, a man built a homemade flying saucer and claimed his son was in it while it flew off in the wind only later to be discovered that the mother and father had used their son to gin up publicity for themselves while the son hid in the house for several hours. Maybe the county clerk wanted to make a name for herself.
In this country, we strive to be the best in the world at everything we try to do. Until the past fifteen to twenty years we've been very successful. But our education has gone into a nosedive and we're no longer number one in all categories. We now have a leader that cedes the lead to others rather than taking advantage of what is still the greatest military in the world, and now, even if we do count votes correctly, we don't report them correctly.
With each election, we find that those that are elected or hired to count, can't count by ones, or when they do count, they don't report correctly. Come to think of it, our county clerks are on a par with the press who don't report the news any longer but rather write the news in a slanted fashion.
It's hard to believe that there are actually people out there that want to change our votes from one man, one vote to allowing those with higher incomes to having more votes. If we can't count by ones, how are we ever going to be able to count by twos, threes or fives?
Mistakes can be made. Mistakes will be made. But they should be the exception, not the rule and since the year 2000, the mistakes or accusations have been the rule.
It's been well proven that computers are not helping the election process. They are instead creating more problems. How do you know that when you put your ballot in the scanner, that your vote was registered on the proper candidate? You don't. I've asked when I slid my ballot into the machine how I could know it was counted properly. The best answer I've gotten is "trust the machine". What evidence do we have to trust these machines, the election workers or even those that report the results provided by the machines or the workers?
I expect to give my best to anything that I try to do. As a Conservative, if a liberal tries to take a shortcut to get the results that they want rather than the actual results, I expect them to be charged for their crime and prosecuted. However, as a Conservative, I expect better from Conservatives. If they take a shortcut to get the results they want rather than the actual results, I expect them to be charged for their crime and prosecuted and given one more day in jail or one more dollar fine than a liberal. It's because I expect more from Conservatives. I expect them to be honest and I expect liberals to be dishonest.
This election reporting in Wisconsin may just be a mistake, but if it's found to be that this clerk had anything to do with under-reporting the results on purpose, she ought to be fired for incompetence at the very least.
You're welcome to comment.
Brett
No comments:
Post a Comment