Excuses

18 October 2016

Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Trump's Claim of Rigged Election Unfounded

Ahead of a crushing defeat, Donald Trump has decided that it is someone else's fault that he will not be president. He is alleging that there are dead people voting, illegal immigrants (his term) voting, and many people voting numerous times. In fact, the number of cases of illegal voting, in-person voter fraud and the like are so rare that one can scarcely say they exist. One study over the last decades says there have been 31 cases and more than 1 billion votes cast. Fake voting is not the problem. It is Mr. Trump's endeavor to call into question the result of the election before it is formalized. Democracy exists to bestow legitimacy on the winner. A more serious attack cannot be imagined.

Mr. Trump tweeted yesterday, "Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!"

He is being backed up by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani who said on CNN, "I'm sorry, dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. You want me to [say] that I think the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair? I would have to be a moron to say that." Mr. Giuliani chose to put the New York City Emergency Command Center in 7 World Trade Center, on the 23rd floor, rather than in Brooklyn where it was less of a target. Mr. Giuliani's command center was destroyed on September 11, 2001. One can tell more about his intelligence from that than from his beliefs about elections.

One must remember that elections in the US are not run by the federal government but by the states, and election officers are often state appointees. Consider the State of Florida, and its 29 electoral votes. The governor is a Republican, as are his appointees. Now, if Mr. Trump loses the vote in Florida, the rigging was done by his own party against him. It takes a special kind of paranoia to believe that is how things are.

As Barack Obama said, "There is no evidence that that [vote rigging] has happened in the past or that there are instances in which that will happen this time. And so I'd invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes."

The problem, of course, is that he doesn't have the votes. He has alienated black Americans, Hispanic Americans, most women and a load of young people. He has a floor to be sure of around 38%, but he also has a ceiling of under 50%. Without some serious help from third party to keep Mrs. Clinton from securing a plurality in most of the important states, Mr. Trump is not going to win.

However, the second guessing of a result that has yet to occur offers a special insight into what the next four years will entail. If he cannot give a concession speech in which he admits defeat and accepts that the will of the people is that he stays in the private sector, then a great many of his supporters will take the position that he was robbed of the White House. Therefore, Mrs. Clinton would occupy the Oval Office illegally and that resistance to anything her administration chose to do would not only be legitimate but it would be a moral imperative.

This nation has barely managed to survive 8 years in which a large segment of the population (led, incidentally, by Mr. Trump) argued in the face of facts that President Obama was not a natural born citizen and therefore could not legally be president. The gridlock in Congress that stemmed from that has brought that institution into ill-repute to say the least. At the core of a democratic election is the idea that it divines the will of the people. If that process is questioned, the democratic nature of the country in question collapses. Elections then are meaningless.

© Copyright 2016 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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