The Polls Weren’t Wrong. It’s time we stopped gaslighting…
By: Jc Gardner
Tags: Politics, Democracy, Collapse, Corruption, Election 2020

It’s time we stopped gaslighting ourselves and faced an ugly truth.

Photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash

Notwithstanding Umair Haique’s interesting contrary position, I humbly submit that the polls weren’t wrong. They just weren’t.

Let’s consider this. Rationally. And Occam’s razor and a little snarky Sherlock Holmes will help us make the final cut.

The US Presidential election is the most important election in the world. Vast amounts of money are thrown at it. The smartest of the smart are hired.

2016 embarrassed the hell out of the smartest of the smart. Since then, they looked at everything. Twice. Three times. More. They fixed everything they could fix.

And still, the polls did not reflect the outcome of the vote. WTF?

The polls weren’t wrong. But the truth is even uglier than Umair’s contention that it was the secret hate vote that arises during collapse. I don’t argue that much of what Umair says is true. But I do NOT believe that was the cause of the discrepency, because many, many Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 came out and very publicly disavowed support for him. From the powerful to the poor, from the political to the apolitical.

So let’s look more carefully. And there’s a simple clue hiding right in plain sight.

Q: Why did the GOP not want mail-in ballots? ESPECIALLY when their core rural (and elderly) constituencies would have a harder time voting in person in a pandemic? What is it about mail-in absentee ballots that they didn’t like?

A: They have a paper trail.

Do we really think that a party as mendacious and venal as the GOP, champions of unlimited dark money, influence-peddling, and greed, a minority party that has made voter suppression a fundamental plank in their party, knowing full well that the voter fraud they whine about DOESNT exist … would stop at mere voter suppression? That they wouldn’t use every lever of power at their disposal to win?

Let’s review: since electronic voting machines emerged on the scene, their vulnerability to manipulation and the poor procedural controls that purport to protect them have been, over and over again, highlighted as glaring inadequacies. Proven again and again to be terrible.

Have GOP-controlled states done what was necessary to protect the integrity of the systems?

No, and clearly no.

No, they haven’t, based on budget allocation and prioritization; and clearly no, because it is profoundly against their self-interest to do so.

The FBI has been warning that foreign actors have been attacking the integrity of our elections more this year than in 2016. Why? Because it worked. And it worked to the benefit of the GOP. Do you think that the techniques that Russia’s intelligence apparatus has developed, through their VERY intensive and meticulous attention to the details of our election process, didn’t include techniques for messing with the voting mechanics themselves? (To be clear, I’m not blaming Russia here. I’m saying they likely did the research to show it was possible, and, no doubt, made sure “key people” knew about it.)

We know that electronic voting machines HAVE BEEN CAUGHT flipping votes. What was found was found, when we found it, was found narrowly. For some(!) puzzling reason, we did virtually nothing about it.

But what did we NOT find, because we either couldn’t, didn’t want to, or didn’t know how to, look?

Let’s go a little further back, to 2003. The head of Diebold told Republicans in a fund-raising letter in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

ES&S/Diebold makes the vast majority of electronic voting machines.

Does anyone think that the malevolence of the GOP and its enablers has DECREASED over the last fifteen years?

The polls were not wrong. Not in 2016, and not in 2020. The brazenness of the GOP, however, has gotten more and more egregious. Which explains how, and why, the correlation between the polls and the results is even WORSE this year. The cheat was WAAAY bigger.

Suppress the vote. Rig the machines. In close states/precincts, no one will notice. They’ll never catch us. It won’t be believable. And we’ll project fraud on to the other guys so they have to defend the sanctity of the election.

It’s been done in the past. It’s happening now.

Every respected poll showed Biden up (by A LOT) and the Senate flipping blue (with high confidence), with months and months of data and analysis. And yet results looking as they do?

It’s preposterous on the face of it. It doesn’t pass the smell test. We have to dig long and hard, and turn our analysis into pretzels to come up with logic that says NEARLY 50% of American voters chose Donald Trump and a GOP Senate after this disastrous and horrifyingly corrupt four years.

Susan Collins, down 4 points and vastly out-funded by Sara Gideon, kept her seat in Maine? Gimme a break.

Occam’s razor says the polls were right, and that the vote was rigged.

Sherlock Holmes would say “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

And frankly, it’s not even that improbable. We just don’t want to believe that the GOP is that craven.

But we know they are. They did nothing to secure the systems and have every incentive to cheat because they are a minority party.

Which man at the top of the GOP, a party that does not want every vote to count, would put a stop to it?

Mitch McConnell, perhaps?